Recently, my WiFi router would stop working intermittently.

This was the fancy, new router which was built for performance. My wife and I are both geeks and our son is a young geek in training, who hates waiting for Sesame Street to stream.

A few weeks after replacing the old router, I was disheartened to see the new one breaking down so quickly. I began to ponder running fiber optic cables through the house.

Then I noticed two things: all my wired devices worked perfectly all the time and that this happened around the same time the new neighbors moved in. Were they the problem?

I started doing some troubleshooting and found out that there’s a simple command line utility to check for Wifi networks and their frequencies.  It’s built right into Windows, so you don’t have to buy anything.

Here it is: netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid

Run that from a command prompt and you’ll see al the wireless networks within range along with some metadata about each one.

Turns out that there was a Wifi network on the same frequency as ours. I changed our WiFi router to another frequency and suddenly, everything became reliable again.

What surprises me is that we have this problem where we live, given that homes around here are fairly spread out.

I wonder what folks in more densely packed areas do. There’s only a finite number of WiFi channels/frequencies. So, what do you do when they’re all in use?