[Verizon Galaxy Note 3 General] bftb0:
Here's the play store app link for the Wifi Analyzer app (farproc).

Doing an occupied channel assessment like this is definitely a good practice for avoiding interference from other WiFi APs; but keep in mind that due to channel overlap a three-channel separation is best. Because of the pervasiveness of WiFi, it may be impossible to find such a "quiet channel" arrangements, though. In such cases though it is useful to at least avoid the same channels that the strongest nearby APs are using. A lot of consumer WiFi routers use default channels assignments of 3, 6, or 9 (so that folks that leave their APs with default settings always end up 3 channels apart from other "defaulters"... two-thirds of the time :D). That suggests that if you are in an area with lots of WiFi (maybe an apartment building or something) try to get 2 channels away (1, 4 or 5, 7 or 8, 11) - at least the interference will be diminished a little bit.

There is one big problem with WiFi scanners though - they don't give a single clue about RF interference by non-WiFi devices in the ISM band(s). Microwave ovens, portable phones, baby monitors, bluetooth devices, yada yada yada. Perhaps there is a way to infer from re-transmission statistics whether or not one channel is better than another, but I'm not sure if such apps even exist, and due to the burst-like nature of many forms of interference (who runs their Microwave oven all day long?), you might have to observe a lot of data to figure something like that out.

Some of the statistics in this Cisco article ("Top 20 Myths of WiFi Interference") are rather startling; worth a look.

[MENTION=5662773]steve181[/MENTION]

Good luck getting any response from Samsung or Verizon. Not because I'm a cynic or anything, but because WiFi operates in a uncontrolled, free-for-all radio space which is basically a giant experiment started by the FCC. The fact that it operates at all - or even most of the time - is hardly some kind of guarantee that it will work in all scenarios.

They (Samsung/Verizon) are not going to come over to your house to find out what is wrong.

And the fact that you can find isolated reports of problems scattered across the internet is not a reliable metric of the incidence rate of problems. That's an "availability bias" problem with the data you have to work with. People with trouble go looking for solutions and people that don't have problems... don't. There might be widespread problems or only rare ones - neither you nor I have the data to support either of those hypotheses with any credibility, though.

The 802.11 protocols are extremely complicated and sophisticated - and complex, sophisticated protocols are good breeding grounds for interop problems (software bugs due to differences in protocol interpretation). It takes at least two to tango (the STA and the AP), and a bug could be on either side. Throw in uncontrolled interference from other random electronic devices, and who is to say that "this is Vendor A's fault" without any due diligence. ("Well, my other devices don't do this" is hardly proof of much - it's just a suspicion or hypothesis at best)

Don't like the results you are getting? Get a different phone, router, or neighborhood. Or fiddle with some settings on them until they work. Yeah it sucks and is a huge drain of time; but practically speaking those are the only alternatives when you run into a WiFi problem.

I once encountered an IT infrastructure bug that was a three-vendor bug: it only occurred with a specific client OS, a specific AntiVirus software release, and a specific vendor's multi-protocol (SMB/NFS) file server. Imagine what that was like trying to get any of the involved vendors to engage. Every WiFi issue has exactly the same 3-fold problem resolution tree: is the problem (a) the STA, (b) the AP, or (c) uncontrolled crap in the area?

good luck