Bearfruit

On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 11:53 AM, David McLaughlin wrote:
> I’ve had much better luck with range by placing the router as high as
> possible within the house.

That’s because the newer wifi signals are actually slightly heavier than air so they fall down gradually after they’re broadcast. Kind of like the branches of a willow tree.

It works good for streaming video, which is download heavy, but if you’re actually sending a lot of packets you’ll want your router to be below the sending machine since it takes more strength to get the weighty packets up to the router at a reasonable rate.

This is also why it’s taken so long to get Internet access on airplanes. It takes an incredible amount of energy to get the packets up that high.

There’s also been evidence that some packets are heavier than others. For example, twitter and web comic packets seem to have better range than, for example, a web page from the Mayo Clinic or the Wall Street Journal.

Originally published to the CIALUG mailing list.