Wireless Network Watcher

Wireless Network Watcher provides a window into your local network that shows what devices are connected and can help identify intruders.

Even if you’re wireless network is password protected, there’s the chance that a user has gained access without permission. This can diminish the bandwidth available to authorized users, and it can be a serious problem when you have to deal with a bandwidth quota. Wireless Network Watcher helps by performing scans of your network and listing all devices that are connected.

Complete scans are completed in just seconds. You can request a scan manually, or you can leave it running as a background process that will scan at regular intervals. For every connected device, the program displays information such as device name, IP address, MAC address and even device type, which it represents via an icon. Note that it helps if you give your devices recognizable names, such as “Living Room Computer,” so that you can more easily identify unknown devices.

Wireless Network Watcher can also log all of the information that it scans and displays. You can export this data to a wide range of common data file formats, and the program can even record to a log in real-time so that you have a file-based history that you can access.

Perhaps the most glaring shortcoming of Wireless Network Watcher is that it doesn’t provide notifications. In other words, you have to be actually watching the program window in order to notice an intruder, which does diminish the potential for this app greatly. The program also doesn’t provide an easy way to block an unwanted device, which would be a useful for the novice users who are likely to use a program like this and not know how to configure their routers that way.

Pros

• Fast local network scan
• Icons help identify devices

Cons

• No notifications
• No blocking features