List all Wireless Access points near you using nmcli on Ubuntu.

Listing all WiFi Access Points around you can be hard sometimes, but this is made easier if you use nmcli to list all of the networks with little fuss.

Use nmcli like this to easily get a textural listing of the available access points.

┏jcartwright@jcartwright-System-Version╼╸╸╸╸╸╸╾
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━◉:~$ nmcli dev wifi list
IN-USE  BSSID              SSID               MODE   CHAN  RATE        SIGNAL  BARS  SECURITY  
        C8:14:51:5F:A9:54  RustyCat           Infra  52    405 Mbit/s  87      ▂▄▆█  WPA1 WPA2 
        34:6B:46:D0:28:28  OPTUS_D02825       Infra  11    130 Mbit/s  54      ▂▄__  WPA2      
        AC:B6:87:D3:CB:2B  OPTUS_D3CB28N      Infra  6     540 Mbit/s  50      ▂▄__  WPA2 WPA3 
        24:7F:20:6C:5A:40  Telstra6C5A3A      Infra  11    130 Mbit/s  47      ▂▄__  WPA2      
        62:22:F3:85:2C:39  Telstra20E859      Infra  1     130 Mbit/s  42      ▂▄__  WPA2      
        60:32:B1:F4:BF:2E  USO                Infra  2     130 Mbit/s  40      ▂▄__  WPA2      
        D6:35:1D:DB:03:24  TelstraDB031C      Infra  11    540 Mbit/s  40      ▂▄__  WPA2      
        62:B6:87:D3:CB:2C  --                 Infra  161   540 Mbit/s  39      ▂▄__  WPA2 WPA3 
        34:6B:46:D0:28:27  OPTUS_D02825_5GHz  Infra  36    405 Mbit/s  37      ▂▄__  WPA2      
        AC:B6:87:D3:CB:2A  OPTUS_D3CB28N      Infra  161   540 Mbit/s  35      ▂▄__  WPA2 WPA3 
        D6:92:5E:20:E8:61  Telstra20E859      Infra  11    540 Mbit/s  34      ▂▄__  WPA2      
        9C:C9:EB:84:E3:05  Telstra1B31        Infra  11    195 Mbit/s  30      ▂___  WPA2      
        D6:35:1D:DB:03:1C  TelstraDB031C      Infra  132   540 Mbit/s  27      ▂___  WPA2      
        62:35:1D:DB:03:1D  --                 Infra  132   540 Mbit/s  24      ▂___  WPA2      
        8A:92:5E:20:E8:5A  --                 Infra  161   540 Mbit/s  22      ▂___  WPA2      
        D6:92:5E:20:E8:59  Telstra20E859      Infra  161   540 Mbit/s  20      ▂___  WPA2      
        92:22:F3:85:2C:32  --                 Infra  100   540 Mbit/s  19      ▂___  WPA2      
        64:69:4E:91:F3:8E  SMA3011518747      Infra  9     65 Mbit/s   15      ▂___  WPA2

This will even list Access Points that do not have a name. This is indeed very useful.

The AP with the strongest signal is at the top.

Run this command to list all available connections for Network Manager.

┏jcartwright@jcartwright-System-Version╼╸╸╸╸╸╸╾
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━◉:~$ nmcli dev
DEVICE           TYPE      STATE                   CONNECTION   
eno1             ethernet  connected               netplan-eno1 
lo               loopback  connected (externally)  lo           
wlx90de80d9ed01  wifi      disconnected            --

If you are using iwlist, instead of nmcli, this command will list all Access Points available.

┏jcartwright@jcartwright-System-Version╼╸╸╸╸╸╸╾
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━◉:~$ sudo iwlist wlx90de80d9ed01 scanning | grep ESSID
                    ESSID:"Telstra20E859"
                    ESSID:"OPTUS_D3CB28N"
                    ESSID:"Telstra6C5A3A"
                    ESSID:"Telstra20E859"
                    ESSID:"TelstraDB031C"
                    ESSID:"OPTUS_D02825"
                    ESSID:"Telstra1B31"
                    ESSID:"OPTUS_D02825_5GHz"
                    ESSID:"RustyCat"
                    ESSID:"TelstraDB031C"
                    ESSID:""
                    ESSID:"OPTUS_D3CB28N"
                    ESSID:""
                    ESSID:"USO"
                    ESSID:"SMA3011518747"
                    ESSID:""

To list the signal strength as well as the Frequency, use an extended regular expression with grep and this will work.

┏jcartwright@jcartwright-System-Version╼╸╸╸╸╸╸╾
┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━◉:~$ sudo iwlist wlx90de80d9ed01 scanning | grep -E 'ESSID|Frequency|Quality'
                    Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
                    Quality=40/70  Signal level=-70 dBm  
                    ESSID:"OPTUS_D3CB28N"
                    Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
                    Quality=38/70  Signal level=-72 dBm  
                    ESSID:"Telstra6C5A3A"
                    Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
                    Quality=36/70  Signal level=-74 dBm  
                    ESSID:"TelstraDB031C"
                    Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
                    Quality=38/70  Signal level=-72 dBm  
                    ESSID:"OPTUS_D02825"
                    Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
                    Quality=30/70  Signal level=-80 dBm  
                    ESSID:"Telstra1B31"
                    Frequency:5.18 GHz (Channel 36)
                    Quality=36/70  Signal level=-74 dBm  
                    ESSID:"OPTUS_D02825_5GHz"
                    Frequency:5.26 GHz (Channel 52)
                    Quality=62/70  Signal level=-48 dBm  
                    ESSID:"RustyCat"
                    Frequency:5.66 GHz (Channel 132)
                    Quality=26/70  Signal level=-84 dBm  
                    ESSID:"TelstraDB031C"
                    Frequency:5.66 GHz (Channel 132)
                    Quality=26/70  Signal level=-84 dBm  
                    ESSID:""
                    Frequency:5.805 GHz
                    Quality=32/70  Signal level=-78 dBm  
                    ESSID:"OPTUS_D3CB28N"
                    Frequency:5.805 GHz
                    Quality=32/70  Signal level=-78 dBm  
                    ESSID:""
                    Frequency:2.422 GHz (Channel 3)
                    Quality=34/70  Signal level=-76 dBm  
                    ESSID:"USO"
                    Frequency:5.18 GHz (Channel 36)
                    Quality=41/70  Signal level=-69 dBm  
                    ESSID:"moto g82 5G_1020"
                    Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)
                    Quality=34/70  Signal level=-76 dBm  
                    ESSID:"Telstra20E859"
                    Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)
                    Quality=32/70  Signal level=-78 dBm  
                    ESSID:"TPW4G_3Th254"
                    Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
                    Quality=31/70  Signal level=-79 dBm  
                    ESSID:"Telstra20E859"
                    Frequency:5.805 GHz
                    Quality=20/70  Signal level=-90 dBm  
                    ESSID:""
                    Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
                    Quality=21/70  Signal level=-89 dBm  
                    ESSID:"Telstra7375DE"
                    Frequency:5.805 GHz
                    Quality=23/70  Signal level=-87 dBm  
                    ESSID:"Telstra20E859"

This is a very simple trick, but nmcli does show a nice graph of signal strength. That is very helpful.

Yet another useful tool is wavemon. Install this on Ubuntu by running sudo apt install wavemon.

Then type sudo wavemon to run this app.

Running wavemon on Ubuntu to list all wireless networks.

Press F3 to scan for all wireless Access Points. Press s to sort by signal strength. This is an amazing app. It will even list all hidden SSID instances.

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