coconutWiFi Reveals Nearby Networks, Status

fuchs (apparently) - 02:01am Sep 17, 2006 PST
via email

I agree, coconutWiFi is nice, easy to use, and unobtrusive. However,
it comes with a heavy performance penalty.

I have a cable connection with a nominal throughput of 6000/600 kb/s
that I use via Airport Express. Without coconutWiFi I get an average
throughput of 5200/530 kb/s, while with coconutWiFi running I only
get 2100/510 kb/s.

Having it in the menu bar seduced me to leave coconutWiFi
continuously running. To avoid the performance penalty, it seems
better to switch it off once one has found a suitable network.

Further testing showed that iStumbler, too, impose a heavy – though
slightly smaller – performance penalty. I get an average throughput
of 2540/510 kb/s.

Norbert E. Fuchs
Department of Informatics
University of Zurich