Such upgraded devices could eliminate the need for separate, costly that discover interfering devices but do nothing to counter interference, say researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The software, called Airshark, can identify Bluetooth and ZigBee devices, cordless phones, wireless video cameras and Xboxes with accuracy in the range of 91.23% and 100%, depending on signal strength.

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Airshark taps into the application programming interface of wireless cards used on access points to gather data about radio frequencies in the surrounding environment. The software has been trained to recognize signatures of various devices, and can pick them out from the ambient radio noise with more than 90% accuracy even if signals from multiple such devices are present.

False positives were .39% for environments with four or more interfering devices and using various signal strengths. The researchers found the rate was .068% for signals stronger than -80dBm. "We also found its performance to be comparable to a commercial signal analyzer," according to their research paper "."