New Houses Killing Wi-Fi 358
Posted
by
CmdrTaco
from the break-out-the-cat-5 dept.
from the break-out-the-cat-5 dept.
Barence writes "Poor Wi-Fi or mobile reception is one of the banes of modern living — and modern building techniques could be making things worse. PC Pro has photos of a new-build being covered from floorboards to rafters in a tin-foil like material. The "highly reflective" material could have unpredictable results for radio signals, potentially bouncing mobile signals away from the house or preventing Wi-Fi signals from reaching the garden. And the new householder is likely to be none the wiser."
I personally love it (Score:5, Funny)
Since moving into my new home, I've noticed a significant reduction in secret CIA messages being injected into my brainwaves. Goodbye ugly tinfoil hat!
This does have a serious side (Score:2)
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This is SPECTACULAR!
I want this stuff installed on my house.
1) My wifi signals don't need to leave my house.
2) My neighbors' wifi signals don't need to enter my house.
3) I *hate* cell phones, and now when people come over, their calls will drop, their bars will drop, and they'll turn the damn things off finally.
4) I have satellite TV.
5) I need better insulation.
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I wouldn't get too cocky about this...nor would I throw away a perfectly good tin foil hat either.
You just have to wait for them to process the "Change of Address" forms before they can know where to start re-transmission of the CIA brainwave secret messages.
Not to make you paranoid or anything, but you might wanna give it a couple weeks more before breath
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Old satellites? Just about every single bird in the Clarke Belt is still using C band - even the brand new ones.
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Yeah, I can see them pitching that one.
"See, we want to microwave somebody's brain. Maybe someone from legal..."
Non-issue really (Score:5, Insightful)
Insulation isn't usually put on interrior walls and I have no need to broadcast my wifi outside of my house. Those that do can position their WAP near a window.
I'm also certain this is not an a recent issue. Almost all the insulation I've seen, apart from spray insulation, has some kind of foil-like backing.
Maybe complainers should spend 2 minutes trying a different wifi channel instead of blaming their home.
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Re:Non-issue really (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, you might. The article has no evidence, conducted no tests, and received no information from the manufacturer or really anyone else. They saw something that looked like tinfoil on an unfinished house, and then wrote a completely speculative article claiming that it will affect wireless waves. My parents house is covered in a material that looks exactly the same (no idea if it actually is the same). I can sit by the pool 20 yards from the house and easily get a strong signal to the wireless router in the kitchen. Maybe this new stuff is different and maybe it causes a problem, but it's flat out irresponsible to write an article claiming that it's a problem without a shred of evidence.
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Issue really. (Score:2)
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I really don't believe that this is anything "new". When I got out of high school (Class of '74) I went into construction. During my apprenticeship as a carpenter, we put up houses with insulation that looked like pressed fiber impregnated with tar, we put up other insulation that looked a lot like styrofoam with foil backing, AND, we most commonly put up fiberglass bats. I didn't pay for the stuff, and I didn't know what it cost - but it was fairly obvious that when we used the pressed fiber stuff, it g
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you get metal studs with a metal mesh lathe laid over the top before you even get to think about putting sheetrock on
Huh?
I'm currently working in a commercial building, and I have been working here continuously since before the gutting and remodeling. Continuously. I saw every wall of this building torn down and rebuilt around me, and while LOTS of metal studs (and the metal "tracks" that go underneath and on top of them) went up, I never once saw any "metal mesh lathe". They just screwed the sheetrock to the studs, just like I'd do to wood studs in my home. Wikipedia seems to indicate that this is normal. [wikipedia.org]
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Stucco (Score:2)
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Yes, in fact this would actually be a good thing if it cuts down on emissions into and out of the house. We have people complaining about emissions from powerline ethernet (been a bit of fuss about that here in the UK recently) interfering with DAB and FM radio reception, and of course we have video senders and baby monitors jamming the 2.4GHz band and making it hard to find a usable wifi channel. Personally I'd be happy to live in a faraday cage.
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Must be nice to have the complaints based on real concerns... Here (Vancouver Island) we had a cellphone tower project cancelled because the PTA didn't want "radiation" within a half kilometer of an elementary school... but the open tank sewage plant is OK.
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So do they plan on going after that unlicensed fusion reactor that bathes their children in radiation all day?
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Re:Non-issue really (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Non-issue really (Score:5, Insightful)
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There's more to it. Not everybody can run ethernet in their apartment.
Re:Non-issue really (Score:5, Interesting)
Most interior walls are insulated just not with the wrap.
If this stuff is RF reflective you can get all kinds of weird multipath issues, signal bouncing round.
However one good thing is that it would help keep your signal IN your house, which is great for security.
Double edged sword.
Who browses the web in their garden? I go out there to unplug!
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i just thought of something, when we moved into our current house, we put in a wooden floor (on the second floor, it's a drive-in house) and under that floor is insulation which has a foil layer. That might explain the dismal wifi reception just a few meters up
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Who browses the web in their garden?
That would be me. Garden lounger, 13" laptop, jar of lemonade with just enough alcohol to keep the bugs away...
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Specifically, interior walls aren't insulated anywhere that the airspace is connected. If you have an air vent in one room, and an air intake in another, I promise those rooms aren't insulated from each other, that would be stupid.
The only 'interior' walls that are insulated are between two 'different' places, like the wall between the house and a garage, or the wall between two condos. Those are really 'exterior' walls that happen to be inside.
And any walls that started out as exterior but are now inside
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I was just about to write the same thing. We moved from a 1920's colonial to a 1980's modern colonial which has foil backed foam on the exterior walls in addition to the typical insulation. Adding outlets is a bit of a pain, so is finding studs, though no where near as bad as slat and mortar. Anyway I'll take the $200/mo utility savings over having to install a couple of extra access points.
Re:Non-issue really (Score:5, Interesting)
I wouldn't say it's a non-issue, but it's certainly not a new issue. A lot of houses use insulation or soundboard (which is metal coated, like in the picture in TFA) in bedrooms, to deaden sounds (who wants their kids to hear sex noises?); even older houses have it. In fact, my brother and I both put insulating soundboard in our master bedrooms for noise reasons, and because the stuff was on sale for $2/sheet at our local Habitat for Humanity Re-Store. As these materials become more common, we'll be seeing them and their problems in more and more new houses and in more and more retrofits and remodels.
And another annoyance, in many older homes, such as my father's and my old college dorm building, is the use of "Stucco of Death". That stuff is aw[esome|full]. It will cause severe roadrash when you're drunk and fall into it, much to your detriment and friends' laughter. And the chicken wire that is used as a backing for the stucco is a very good Faraday cage. It's nearly impossible to get signal for any cell phone in my dad's house even though you get full bars outside and at open windows/doors, and no one can get his wifi signal outside, even though he has four APs throughout his house.
Re:Non-issue really (Score:4, Interesting)
From my time working in the cell phone industry, I'd say "fooie!" to this being a problem at all. Atleast with cell towers, metal objects created almost no interfierance. Water was the devil. A huge chunk of metal in from of an antena had only a tiny impact, but fill that chunk of metal with water, say like a water tower, and it's like a giant black hole for radio signals. We also had issues with small lakes bouncing signals like crazy. You could be driving around a lake, have a tower 100 feet away from you, and another 12 miles away across the lake, and we'd have to put them on no-handoff lists, because a little bit of waves in the water can give the CC the impression that you are getting a better signal from across the lake.
A think layer of tin on the back of your insulation, that has been being used for decades, isn't going to cause any issue that hasn't already been dealt with.
-Rick
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I give the thin tin sheeting probably not being a problem, since I have no issues with my soundboard (my first paragraph was most disagreeing with OP about the use of insulation on interior wall.) The chicken wire from stucco thing, I can assure you, is 100% true. Now, it's possible that water is the actual cause and the chicken wire a coincidence since we're in Michigan and there are streams in everyone's back yard and pools, ponds, and lakes are everywhere, but it seems like a bit too much coincidence tha
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Yes it can be a real pain in the arse.
My parents never had wifi issues at their house but since they had an extension to extend their kitchen into a large kitchen/living area they can no longer connect to the Wifi router in another room. That room is really a wifi deadzone now, it's not really the end of the world, but it's not really ideal either and is somewhat inconvenient- the whole idea of wifi being that you can roam, and so if you have to go back to another part of the house to use it then, well, tha
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Well, I mostly agree but having a thin sheet of metal over most of your outside walls might very well have negative consequences for reception inside as well. Signals bounce you know and it will create pockets were the interference is destructive. So you might experience strange dead zones and such, but these can probably be mostly solved by moving the laptop three feet to the left.
You make sure these house wraps are grounded and thus prevent them from becoming a passive radiator, but that will have other
Antenna (Score:2)
Get one.
Use it.
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Yup. This will actually improve in-house wifi - Your neighbors won't cause as much interference to your network.
If you need outdoor wifi - set up an access point outside.
It will be detrimental to cell phone reception indoors however - but there are technical solutions to that. The amount of money you save on energy by having reflective barriers will make up for the cost of a Wilson amplifier setup - http://www.wilsonelectronics.com/ProductListing.aspx?Category=9 [wilsonelectronics.com] . Interestingly enough, the shielding of t
Re:Non-issue really (Score:4, Insightful)
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Where said blogger is an editor at a magazine that just did a cover feature on the same style of meterial being used on some internal rooms and potentially causing wifi problems. Which one would hope would actually mean they have a little bit of short term knowledge in order to base their still flimsy guesses on. Of course that article might have been all guesswork as well, it's not a magazine I read to know.
And he doesn't just describe it as "foil-like" he also provides the product spec sheet that states t
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Oh, wait... *potentially*.
Wake me when there's a real problem. Has he actually tried it or is he just blowing smoke out of his backside?
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Sounds like a perfect question for the MythBusters.
Calling Mr. Savage. Will Adam Savage please report to th... aw, drat, I've got no bars.
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In pract
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Most of the insulation I've used has had a paper backing, similar to a paper bag. Not that I've used a lot, but I've helped out family on these things from time to time. This is less of an insulation and more of a house wrap (like Tyvek). My last house didn't have this, or any wrap, but I still had terrible cell signal inside the house, but 4-bars of 3G in the front yard.
This is the foam board type insulation that is nailed to the studs prior the siding/brick being attached to the outside wall. I've seen insulation rolls with Mylar backing, but it's not very common.
Sales of Access Points Looking Up (Score:2)
This should boost the low end Tech jobs. Lots of external antennas and WiFi boosters to be installed.
...advantages outweigh the problems (Score:5, Insightful)
can have your cake and eat it too (Score:2)
It should be possible to make the material transparent in the radio spectrum but reflective in the visible/infrared spectrum. This would be the best of both worlds.
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We use about 10% of our national energy to heat/cool our homes (another 10% to heat/cool commercial buildings). Energy efficient construction (basically insulation, gap sealing, and orientation/design) can _reduce_ heating/cooling loads by 40-60% at _lower_ initial cost. Saving hundreds of millions of barrels of oil, ft^3 of natural gas, or tons of coal and spending thousands of dollars less for new construction makes the WiFi in the garden a pretty trivial issue in comparison... especially
Grounded? (Score:3)
For those who know more than I about the dark arts of RF propagation, what would the effect be of ungrounded conductive sheets? Substantial signal attenuation? Not much effect? Completely unpredictable absorption and re-emmision that could vary wildly according to the exact geometry of the piece?
In a similar vein, if one had an AP/router that one didn't love to much(not so hard when they start at $20...), what would the effect be of attempting to use the metal foil as an antenna, by coupling it directly to the antenna output? Horribly non-optimized for the frequency, I'd imagine; but would it be expected to Not Work, to Not Work and kill the RF amp, to work somewhat, to work better than one might expect?
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Plastic wouldn't have the infrared heat reflectivity / low emissivity of foil, that's why they use foil. Good question about grounding it though--none of the insulation products really have that in mind (that I know of anyhow), and I'd imagine connecting it in any way to the electrical system (even the ground) would have to be studied for implications for fire safety/etc.
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Large ungrounded sheets can still have a significant effect on RF. At the higher frequencies such as 2.4 GHz, any substantial piece of metal can, in effect, be a virtual ground and, as you mention, significantly attenuate the signal. More likely it will reflect signals (more on that below). Taken to an extreme, a house wrapped head to toe in a metal would become a sort of Faraday cage, with no RF passing in or out. In practice, this isn't going t
Re:Grounded? (Score:4, Insightful)
The material is being used for its additive insulation value, PERIOD. It is not a moisture barrier, nor is it there to block "sheetrock mites". WTF? THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS SHEETROCK MITES.
Good grief. The original unsubstantiated hysteria in TFA was bad enough; don't heap more FUD on the pile.
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You must be deadly at poker. I really wasn't seeing your tell. Sorry for being so snippy.
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That's what you think. I'm Scottish; our building standards require us to use paisley-backed foil insulation in the walls to act as a barrier to keep microscopic haggis from migrating through the walls into our drinks cabinets, and consuming all our whisky. It's a serious problem. I wouldn't be at all surprised if other countries didn't have something similar.
"Alarm Bells"? (Score:3)
Author of TFA says he doesn't know if the material he observed has an impact on radio, just quoting the fact that it's "reflective" from a vendor brochure, but according to the same pdf [glidevale.com] the material is in fact metallic
Yep, sounds like a radio-eater all right. Interesting stuff, too.
So where is the real article? (Score:2)
We are not supposed to be the couch potatoes here.
My excuses for not doing it is that I have only a small amount of knowledge about RF, no gear apart from a few cheap access points and small antennas, and more importantly live halfway around the world from where this stuff is going into houses. It seems
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The stuff is $7-$10/sheet (4'x8') at most home improvement stores. I just got done insulating an outbuilding with it (and with the foiled bubble wrap for the parts that the solid polystyrene board wouldn't work well for). Given an average new home and my experience with the outbuilding, yeah, this will block WiFi. My phone drops coverage to almost nill inside and full bars outside. Both operate in a similar frequency range.
-nB
awesome (Score:2, Insightful)
At least I won't have to wear my tinfoil hat at home.
Really? (Score:3)
And the new householder is likely to be none the wiser.
You are telling me that Joe and Jane Enduser don't know about how RF works? Or that their computer is not the monitor? Or that their smartphones are also working off of RF?
And further that there are new homes that are being built without setting up even some basic runs for modern say CAT6 wires? You say that all you need is co-ax? Or some 1900 tech pair of twisted strands?
Oh and the right wing tells me to chant USA USA USA no matter what idiotic news I see? Golly Lassy! Tech Timmy is down a well! Better go run to Fox News with why ignorance is good!
Really reaching here (Score:3)
I love to complain about stupid things more than your average person, but is this really a problem? Put a repeater in the window. My heating bill, on a 1980s house is by far once of the most cash sucking and depressing aspects of my budget.
And as an added bonus, maybe it'll keep neighbors from stealing everyone's wifi.
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My heating bill, on a 1980s house is by far once of the most cash sucking and depressing aspects of my budget.
Same here, but with a 1920's house. I'll be breaking out the Bacofoil tonight, and covering the whole place with it.
Re:Really reaching here (Score:4, Insightful)
Only because you chose to not fix that problem.
$1500 to have the house insulation upgraded.
$6800 to have the AC and furnace changed over to a SEER 18 and a 98% efficient setup.
$6500 to have new double pane windows installed
$1100 to have the house checked for air leaks and those fixed with caulking.
My winter heating bill IN January when it was 6-10 degrees F outside most of the time in michigan up where we get real snow was $80.00, December was less and Febuary was less.
and you can do all of that in stages. the furnace and AC I got $1500.00 off my taxes because I bought them, that paid for the insulation. The windows we did over the course of a year one window at a time. I had a carpenter show me the first two times, I did the rest except for the big 8'X12' picture windows in the front room.
Stopping restaurants for 2 years paid for the windows, insulation and air leak check and repair. The furnace and AC were paid for by not buying a new car this year, suffering with a 42" 720p plasma, and torturing my family by not going to Florida for a 1 week vacation but staying home. I know I should be turned in for torturing my family.
Most people live in old houses with crap insulation and crap windows that have a 600 year old furnace in the basement that are never maintained properly. Your home is in disrepair, fix it and your heat and AC bills drop like a rock.
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Greatest effect was the furnace. When we bought the home 3 years ago the furnace looked new, (the previous home owner though that cleaning things is the same as maintaining things, it looks great and was even waxed with car wax yearly!) so I investigated and discovered that that model was last made in 1989 and that serial number was made in 1986 and it was a 62% efficient furnace, 25 years later the furnace guy determined that it was running at about 55% (they do a thermal comparison of exhaust temp and ai
Phones? (Score:4, Interesting)
Uh, Wifi? I'd think the cell phones (I assume that's what OP means by 'mobiles') are the important one...
Plenty of people including myself only have a cell phone these days.
My apartment's fine, but I have school in a very concrete-and-steel building that has very poor phone reception, which ends up draining my battery in no time. They do have good wifi because of a lot of APs, though. Remember, you can add more APs for wifi, but not for phones.
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Remember, you can add more APs for wifi, but not for phones.
Proven false by example. [dealextreme.com]
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Remember, you can add more APs for wifi, but not for phones.
Not true. Residential users can use broadband backhaul for relatively cheap (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtocell)
Bigger users can get bigger equipment. Last year, my office installed entire cell stations for major providers in our main equipment rooms and wired them with low-loss coax to little dome antennas scattered around the buildings. Helps coverage immensely :)
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Everyone and their brother replied to you to remind you about the existence of femptocells and small/cheap repeaters and such, but those don't work all that hot in a large building that actively eats RF or have lots of users.
Fortunately, there's other solutions [zinwave.com] that actually work and actually scale. (Fiber backhaul for in-building wireless? You betcha.)
There's other examples [powerwave.com], too.
(It's always amusing to me that Slashdot will, on one hand, recommend the fanciest and best networking kit imaginable, and then
Building codes (Score:2)
This is irritating, but what I think is more irritating is that fiber is not required in all new buildings, especially condos and apartment buildings. It's a huge pain to get it in there once the building is built, and data wiring is just as important electrical wiring in the future. Why isn't this being done?
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Building legislation is always a few years behind everything else, and is almost invariably a reaction to legislation or safety issues rather than a reaction to an inconvenience.
Fun fact: The UK enacted the Disability Discrimination Act in 1995, which essentially forced organisations to make allowances for people with disabilities.
UK building regulations caught up in 2004. Lots of large organisations commissioned buildings some years after 1995 and found they had to make changes shortly after the builders h
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Because you can't just plug fiber into your computer. Most motherboards come with ethernet ports, but I have never seen one with fiber input.
Content free article (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, talk about content free.
That article had even less content than the guy who was pushing his blog posts awhile back.
Your insulation 'might' be blocking wifi &/or 3g. But we don't know, we didn't bother to do any actual research.
i'd rather buy 2-3 more wifi bases (Score:4, Insightful)
than spend $500 more in heating costs every year
i for one welcome our new tin foil energy saving house overlords
Great! (Score:3)
Really a Problem? (Score:2)
Here in Texas, the "shiny reflective material" is used to help keep electricity costs down in the Summer. I have a 2500 sq. ft. single story home built in 2009 and get WiFi throughout, no problems. I keep my wireless router deep in the walk-in closet of the master bedroom. Something tells me this isn't as big of a problem as the story is letting on to.
Old hat. (Score:3)
Call someone that has aluminum siding and aluminum screens on their home as them how their home from 1950 that was resided in the 70's or 80's works for wifi to the garden or the grotto.. This is not new. Nor is it news to anyone that actually has a clue about Wifi or home building in general.
Insulation boards have had foil backing for decades. a lot of other building products as well.
It's just whiny rich people that notice after moving into their new McMansion. Because they are too damn cheap to buy a second AP for the back yard.
Could be worse (Score:2)
It wouldn't be terribly difficult to set up a booster for the house. If a cell signal booster is the price for more energy efficient homes, that seems like a fair trade.
We used to live in a steel house and would have to stand in front of the upstairs window to get a cell signal. It was pretty funny announcing to people they had to go upstairs to make a call.
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There's a tech called UMA, which allows cell phones to connect cell calls over a WiFi network. Only T-Mobile implemented it though, and almost none of their phones support it anymore (there was a brief period they tried to push it).
Personally, I love the idea, because almost everyone has WiFi *anyhow*, so why not leverage that? Why have a second, special-purpose device like a femtocell?
I don't know why, but when 3G phones came out, not a single 3G phone for a long time came with UMA support, and then I thin
Other issues with modern buildings and WiFi (Score:2)
I live in a modern high-rise building in the middle of a dense downtown area. To comply with fire codes, all interior studs are metal - in fact almost nothing inside the building (besides furniture) will burn. This definitely affects my WiFi - I have my router in my living room and I have trouble getting a usable signal in my bedroom. My solution of course was to wire the place with ethernet and have multiple routers.
On the other hand, I have floor-to-ceiling glass for about 40% of my exterior walls. Th
New invention (Score:2)
So they have now created a new invention, a house to act as a microwave oven. Quick, where are the patent lawyers.
Same goes for a lot of older homes (Score:2)
Aren't most new houses wired? (Score:2)
I would think that most if not all new houses these days are wired up in each room for cable and ethernet/phone. Is this not the case? Obviously you still want wireless to work, as I constantly walk around my house with my phone and laptop, but for the most part these problems should be easy to mitigate.
Personally I would be very wary about buying new construction that didn't have wiring to the rooms- who knows where else they may have cut corners!
Old stucco (Score:3)
My last house was built in 1925, and covered in stucco. Newer stucco is usually some kind of latex goop and doesn't need much of a backing, but this old stucco was basically mortar and needed metal mesh to support it. In this case, it was a heavy diamond mesh like you find on outside stairs and whatnot. The guys who blew insulation into the walls from the outside just loved it...
That being said, I never saw a significant problem with either cellular phone or wifi signals.
I have the opposite problem (Score:2)
I now have to go out and spend money to fix this
PS: at most, I can see 8 of my neighbors, but one of my co workers say he can see more then 10 on a good day
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Get them to put it on either channel 1 or 11 and put your AP on the other one. Seeing as this is a super-easy fix, they shouldn't have a problem with it, but if they do you could blow some smoke with some BS about the FCC guidelines for not interfering and broadcasting with really high-powered radios. They most likely aren't violating any FCC rules, but again, seeing as it's a 5-minute task to change the channel on the router, they'll hopefully be willing to do it.
Good. (Score:2)
Good for Wifi. Will prevent pollution. I live in a large Condo complex and i see 50 WLANs at the same time. If 20 of them are active its going to reduce my WLAN transfer rate. If i see only 5 active at the same time, it will be much better.
As a physicist: WLAN is not specified to go trough undefined materials. walls of houses are, in general, undefined materials. If you like good wlan coverage in your garden, then place an external antenna or at least an repeater close to the window (unless the window is al
Read carefully your contract (Score:2)
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Just got a Femtocell from At&satan and I am pretty happy with it so far. The interference from my wife yelling at me about poor cell phone reception is down 93.2%
Its insulation, and not new (Score:5, Informative)
Its just insulation. It goes on exterior walls to help form a heat boundary. Its not even a little bit new, the observer is just a really shitty observer and never noticed it being put into every building thats been built in the last 40 or so years at least. Example, my cheap little home built in 1977 has it.
It doesn't go on interior walls, you don't generally insulate interior walls, as the air flow through open doors in your home and the fact that your duct system intentionally moves air into those rooms would defeat the point entirely.
Some people do choose to insulate their interior walls for sound dampening, but not with foil backed insulation, they use cheaper insulation without it or specific insulation for sound, which is what we did when remodeling our living room to prevent sound from the TV/stereo from bothering people sleeping in other rooms.
It won't effect your Wifi signal as its on the external walls only and no one would use it on interior walls (even if they wanted to insulate) because its more expensive and just a waste of money in those locations.
If you can't get a signal between the first floor and second floor of your home it has almost nothing to do with insulation and the fact that the antennas used on wifi routers are designed to radiate horizontally from the antenna (perpendicular to its orientation). It would be, in almost every case, a complete waste of RF energy to broadcast a signal upwards from a WAP when for most cases there will be no one above it or below it that its supposed to get too.
Finally ... it has VERY LITTLE EFFECT on the signal. My home is completely wrapped in it, walls and attic, and we sit on a slab, yet I still have no problem picking up and connecting to any wifi access point within 2 houses of me (and we aren't talking about town homes 10 feet from each other, at least 100-150 feet between homes), though its not like I'm getting full speed out of 802.11g with it, though my workshop, which is about 75 feet from my home will consistently get 10mb out of it, and it is insulated with brand new (built 3 years ago) foil backed insulation as well.
Does it effect the signal, sure, everything does. Does it effect it enough to care about it over the massive energy savings for heating and cooling? No, not even a little.
The home owner is likely to be none the wiser about the size of the wiring in his home either, and wether its really designed to be used like many of us where we have several machines in one room functioning as servers/routers/firewalls for our home networks drawing way more power than the home was designed to deliver to a single outlet. As a general rule, if you don't know what that shiny material is, there are far more important things in your home that you should learn about first if your worried about how your technology is going to be effected. Wiring of the home would be top on my list. Clean power is far more of a concern than insulation. Nothing worse than wiring thats too small for the job causing your power supplies or UPSes to continually be fighting surges and spikes due to turning off and on other equipment. Older homes with shared runs using 14 gauge wire to power multiple outlets are far more damaging and problematic than the insulation, they are also considerably more dangerous in a modern world where 10 amps simply isn't enough power for some home appliances at startup (vacuum cleaner, microwave, big plasma TVs). You really want 12 gauge as a minimum, with individual runs from the breaker box to EACH outlet, 10 gauge if you can afford it is a much better choice and far safer. Considering how little it effects the cost of a new build, you'd be an idiot if you were given the option and didn't take it.
Lath and plaster. (Score:2)
Yeah jackass my house is made from freaking chicken wire. Mylar, lol I got a god damn Faraday cadge.
can be considered an advantage, depending... (Score:2)
you say it like it's a bad thing!
My place was built in '82 (Score:2)
I'm not worried about the wi-fi because I have a wireless router. But the cell phone reception is horrendous. I take a few steps outside and it's fine. While I was fixing the place up I had poked some holes in the walls and found metal beams inside. The place is like a giant Faraday cage. The fact that it's the bottom floor of a three-story condo doesn't help either.
I just spent $250 (it was on sale, too. Normally it's $400) on a cell phone signal booster. I hope it helps.
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Few meters of cable, small antenna and.... miracle!
Sooo you're saying we should have a cable put the antenna for the wifi right next to our receiving antenna? ...... :P
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I'm actually curious what the effect would be, as I assume no effort is made to ground the wrap. Would it act as a shield.. or just a large antenna.
Paranoia aside, I think we actually could do with a little less RF. If this stuff just incidently provides a shield agaisnt the insane amount of random RF that we get blasted with day to day, I don't see the harm. If you want wifi outside your house, get an external antenna!
I also wonder if shielding the outside of your house would improve reception inside.
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This is nothing that can't be solved with a few repaters.
Or some wires!
Ok, I get that for laptops wifi makes sense .. but if it's a desktop... wire that up!
And if your gonna run some wires, for the love of the great fire cactus, put some conduit in place and leave a permanent wire pull!
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Just nuke it from orbit, it's the only way to be sure.