Towards the end of my time in Sydney I was dependent on a budget Internet connection provided via a cheap, five year old modem/router to which I had no physical access.

I’ll skip over the first-world complaints and jump straight to the (hopefully) helpful bit, how you can easily check the quality of your connection to a wireless network (from a Mac). This approach didn’t immediately jump out from my Google searches, probably because there are many other factors (e.g. channel selection) that can impact your overall experience that are more likely to be the source of your problem.

You need to launch the Wireless Diagnostics application...

You don’t actually want this, you want the Performance utility that it gives you access to...

If you let this run for a while you should see something like this...

Google will be able to tell you more about what these all mean but for now you should just focus on Quality. The value really needs to be more than 30. If it is less than this your Internet experience will almost certainly suffer.

It’s interest to wander around (assuming you have a laptop) and see how this value changes.

Wireless network configuration used to be a mystery known only to network engineers. It has become a little more accessible to the technically savvy but, in my view, still has a little way to go...