In addition to protecting your Mac from hackers, vandals and all kinds of network attacks, NetBarrier X5 has a set of tools for monitoring your network and checking network status. One of these tools is especially useful if you use AirPort to connect your Macs to a network.
NetBarrier’s Network section shows you a great deal of information about your network interfaces (AirPort, Ethernet, Bluetooth, etc.), and also shows you a list of all available AirPort networks, together with their signal strength and what channel they use. This last bit of information – the channel – can be especially useful when setting up a network at your home or office. If you are surrounded with WiFi networks, you want yours to be on a channel that is relatively unencumbered. You can check which channels are used by neighboring networks, and find out which is the best channel to use for your network.
You can also find which networks are open, when on the road, to know which you can connect to. Since you can see the signal strength in NetBarrier, you can see right away which network is best to try connecting to first. (Naturally, signal strength is not the only criterion for good network access; a lot also depends on how many other people are using that network.)
NetBarrier X5 has other useful network monitoring tools; check them out if you want to keep tabs on what’s happening on your network.
