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| Is WiFi Getting Worse? Electromagnetic Pollution, and Why It Matters |
"My cell service just isn't what it was five hears ago."
If this quote rings true, you're not alone. Though our digital infrastructure has been growing faster and faster, so has the amount of people utilizing it, leading to an overall slower network speed. Sometimes, though, the solution isn't to simply buy a faster phone plan. Sometimes, the solution is to get everyone else to just shut up.
The internet is not an infinite resource. This sounds counter-intuitive at first - can't you simply buy a faster modem? But no, at some point, even the fastest equipment will bottleneck against the internet's frequency allocation. At it's most fundamental level, wireless internet is simply a radio communicator. A radio transciever (a reciever and transmitter combo) is located in your phone, and its counterpart in your modem. And like any other radio, it must be dialed to the proper frequency.
Intuitively, this frequency would be based on what network you select, with each network operating on a separate frequency to avoid interference from eachother. Yet this is not the case. All modern WiFi transcievers are pre-dialed to select frequencies (2.4GHz and 5GHz in the United States) by the manufacturer, shared by all networks. As a consequence, someone streaming high-definition video within range of your WiFi will slow your devices down respectively, even if they're on a completely different network.
And nowdays, with the exponential increase in wireless devices, from laptops to lightbulbs, we are increasingly utilizing the limited frequency space availible to us.
This article is incomplete! Enjoy a kitten while you wait for the final version.