Wireless Channels (some observations)

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eXDee

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#60105 19-Apr-2010 15:31

Went on a 10km drive or so with the netbook running inSSIDer and scanning as it went.
Observed 344 wireless access points.

I didnt save the data but from just scrolling through it i noticed a few things.

Almost all of them run channel 11 or channel 1 - this is interesting, overall if you if you want the least interference, it seems it'd be a good idea to use channels 3-9!
Of course, check with inSSIDer (or similar) for your area, but i just found this interesting.

Also the majority of them seem to be Thompson branded - ie Telecom customers. The next most popular was DLink, followed by linksys/netgear. Dynalink and Belkin popped up every now and then too.

Most used WPA2-PSK due to telecom sending them pre passworded. Interestingly, there seemed to be a fair few more on WPA-PSK than WEP with perhaps a few more on WPA.
Seems people are listening to the advice of 'WEP is bad'.

Very few were unprotected.

Hardly a scientific study, but i just found this interesting.

freitasm

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Geekzone

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#320262 19-Apr-2010 15:47

Interesting. Regarding the suggestion on changing the channel, you all should read http://www.geekzone.co.nz/inquisitor/2996 to find out more about this - just chancing to an adjancet channel is not enough.

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eXDee

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#320401 19-Apr-2010 19:14

Yes thats a very good point. Which is why i suggested channels 3-9 because that way it doesnt overlap (as much) with 1 or 11. Choosing 6 would be ideal but theres already someone else using that channel in my area.

inSSIDer has a very useful graph where it shows where overlapping is going on (not as much as that diagram though), i'm running mine on channel 4 which has the least overlap with nearby access points,

raytaylor

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#320482 19-Apr-2010 22:49

When i went war driving through havelock north a couple of years ago, i found that there were twice as many unencrypted AP's in the higher socioeconomic areas, than there were encrypted.

In the lower socioeconomic areas, they were almost all encrypted.

Ray Taylor

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eXDee

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#321855 22-Apr-2010 22:13

Did another scan. Decided to make some stats from my unscienfitic survey. This was driving through several different areas, from around a university to newer subdivisions to a slightly commercial area. Just some interesting data.

Heres some channels:
120 on one
2 on two
7 on three
3 on four
1 on five
97 on six
17 on 9
3 on 10
154 on 11
Note: there were a few motels etc running multiple transmitters for a
single SSID on channel six. This meant that there could be up to 10
different MAC addresses broadcasting a single SSID, which affects the
results quite drasticly as you can see. inSSIDer creates an invidual listing per mac adress rather than SSID name.

Encryption.
38 Unencrypted.
180 WPA2-PSK AES
15 WPA2-PSK TKIP
6 WPA1-PSK AES
90 WPA1-PSK TKIP
75 WEP

Almost ALL of the WPA2-PSK encrypted networks were thompson branded. And almost all of them carried their original Thompson SSID (with the random letters/numbers on the end). This is because telecom ships them preconfigured for WPA2-PSK.

33 Unknown Vendor
4 3COM
2 Apple Computer
45 Dynalink
5 Asus
28 Belkin
55 Linksys
85 D-Link
5 Netcomm
19 Netgear
3 TP-Link
120 Thompson

So that was my little unscientific survey.