Slow Wi-Fi? Add houseplants to the list of suspects Houseplants could be slowing down your Wi-Fi, according to Broadband Genie, which reckons surfers can increase broadband speeds by almost 40 percent just by moving their router away from any greenery. The UK internet price comparison service has come out with a classic piece of silly season promotion - and, yes, we are …
"And you trty to educate them by suggesting they plug a network cable in, if possible and their eyes glaze over."
If the whole household is using wifi and several of them "netflix and chill" there will be violence due to buffering.
All of my computers are hardwired to the ethernet switch and scream along. The wifi gets used for calls since it works better than the cell tower and I use it to update stuff such as the tablets that are a PIA to try and plug in.
It seems rather senseless to me to have fast internet and then throttle it by using wifi.
BT for one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vFsw9FLufPQ
A lot of their ads where you see devices connected via WiFi always start with the mantra - "Internets playing up...."
No, it's your effing WiFi. Use a godam cable!
"Unbreakable WiFi".... Pah, let me at it and I'll tell you if it is "unbreakable".... LOL
Even just as fairly pretty cellulose sacs of mostly-water could be expected to badly affect wifi.
If you wrapped your hands around the aerial the signal strength would also drop. Because, again, you're mostly water. And water's really, really good at blocking wifi.
Also why you shouldn't take your laptop swimming. The sudden loss of wifi when underwater confuses the OS and, in its panic, it fries all the components. It's still safe to put them in Faraday bags because the darkness is relaxing, just like it is for birds.
Degradation by a passive transmission medium will only affect a digital signal if it causes multiple reflections which smear out each pulse. Multipath equalisation* to counteract this has been around since the days of GSM. Hide your microwave-frequency WiFi router among a shedload of well-watered plant pots, and as long as enough actually gets past to be detectable at all, the tech /ought/ to deal with it. Have the WiFi boffins lost the plot after all these years, or is our Broadband Giraffe having a Genie?
* FWIW that typically involves a training sequence and digital deconvolution to provide a correction factor
Multipath definitely brings some benefits. My son's shared accomodation upgraded their router from the Virgin Media Hu 3 (Wifi5) to the Hub 5(WiFi6) this summer, with respect to WiFi the only real differences were 802.11ax and an additional pair of antenna. However, the difference in terms of range through the 100+ year old house with solid brick internal walls was immense. FarProc WiFi Analyser registering good signal where previously there was practically none (router location unchanged). This was a benefit because the way the house had been wired meant PowerLine adapters were only of limited help.
"Hide your microwave-frequency WiFi router among a shedload of well-watered plant pots, and as long as enough actually gets past to be detectable at all, the tech /ought/ to deal with it."
This doesn't seem right. SNR matters a lot. Weaken the signal, SNR drops, and you end up on a slower connection. This absolutely happens in the wild, all the time. I have even, once, seen it with plants being the (apparent) main culprit; moving the plants, but not the router or receiving device, saw speed improvements. (Someone had tried to hide the router with a wall of greenery, but I didn't check whether it was the pots full of damp soil or the greenery which caused the signal attenuation - I imagine they'd have objected to pulling the plants out of the soil to satisfy my curiosity.)
Fair enough, where you are using an ISM or modern close-packed channel and there is a lot of interference about, the more marginal the signal the more of it gets drowned and the slower things get. All part of the modern trend towards enshittification. Where's my sleeping bag?
You also see slow speeds in big detached houses, where there is little interference from neighbouring properties. Combination of sheer distance (e.g. at the bottom of the garden) and lots of walls in the way. Generally it doesn't get slow enough to be noticeable, until you are trying to watch a high-quality stream on a laptop in the wrong part of the property, or some such, but it's not uncommon to see connections below 10mbps if you actually check.
Just replaced my windows; it’s had a negative impact on the signal strength to be had in the garden, looks like I will need to install an external AP, so I can access the WiFi from the garage (not digging a 40 metre trench, just for one data cable and the way the electricity to the garage is wired prevents the use of powerline adapters).
Meanwhile, the Wi-Fi 8 standard, [...], is set to focus on greater reliability and delivering a better experience...
Just wait for the WiFi 9 standard. It will be much greener while simplifying and improving all our experience by adopting plants and foliage to send and receive your WiFi signals. All you need is a new WiFi.9-RJ45 pot with your favourite plant and the signals will be great and Green. You will need 2.4, 5 and 6 GHz approved soils and water additives for optimal growth of your WiFi distribution jungle.
Also, genetically optimized WiFi plants(*) will improve your experience.
(*) Terms and Conditions apply. Plants may send telemetric data back, for example, for environmental checks, including water and lighting levels and conditions. Your plant(s) may be terminated if you breach the plant Terms of Service or try to multiply your plant.
"My mother would have put the router behind the plant pot simply because a plant looks nicer than some ugly piece of plastic with flashing lights."
The same thing happens with Hi-Fi when it doesn't look nice enough to score a good WAF (Wife Acceptance Factor). They'll want to conceal it with plants, etc which degrades the sound that was so expensive to realize.
Just like their are covers for radiators to make them look nicer while still letting heat out, it's not that hard to make a cloth box from some scrap wood and tasteful fabric to conceal the wifi box. Tape over the LEDs won't hurt anything except when trouble shooting. I have some dark filter plastic over the lights on mine so they aren't as distracting but I can still see what the status is if I need to. It's in my office so I don't care if the box can be seen or not as long as it works well.
A lukewarm router is an excellent spot for a cat to wrap around while napping. And unlike plants, they can follow routers when they get moved. Solution: raise routers at the top of a mast in the middle of a room or screw them to the ceiling if there's a nearby electric outlet.
I too got a thermal camera to check for cold spots on walls. Found those, but as you, I found the heat pipes under the floor too. A few years later (this year) I was able to see a plan of the house with my flat with unexpected lines - until I noticed that i recognize them as my heating from my IR photos.
"This was a meme back in the day...cats on a toasty starlink dish"
It took all of 6 seconds for my cat to detect the new electric blanket when I first got it. The old Sony CRT computer monitors were a fav of a couple of my cats back in the day. I had to put some spiky things on top as they polluted the insides with dander, dirt and fur. It seems it was warm enough behind the monitors after that. Makes sense. When I did concert sound, I could have a nap during the show between the amp racks and the speakers where it was nice and warm from the cooling fans. I'd wake right up when the noise stopped. One can be tired enough to sleep through pretty much everything.
They're also keyboard blockers. In winter, my cat has the knack of hopping on my desk table and lying on my laptop as soon as I have my back turned. I go get a glass of water, or go to the toilet, come back and bam! there she is, purring contentedly with the typical cat face of what ? I ain't done nothin' wrong, did I ?
So I've taken the habit of lowing the lid just far enough that she can't get under it, but not far enough to put the laptop to sleep.
Put a small heating pad (doesn't have to be much since it is cat sized, could be USB powered so safety isn't any concern) under a blanket/cushion in spot your cat likes to lay that you don't want them. They'll move to where you want, you just have to understand their motivations.
Same way you solve "my cat won't drink out of his water bowl". Cats have evolved to prefer moving water because it is less likely to contain parasites. So instead of shooing them out of the kitchen sink with its dripping faucet get them a little water feature fountain instead of a bowl and they'll leave the sink alone.
"So instead of shooing them out of the kitchen sink with its dripping faucet get them a little water feature fountain instead of a bowl and they'll leave the sink alone."
The downside of that is they get used to the fountain and when it dies (cheap chinesium), they can get dehydrated and you wind up with a trip to the vet.
Standard WiFi operates at 2.4 GHz, which is the harmonic of water. A leaf that has a high moisture content acts like a mirror at that frequency, reflecting the signal, and a leafy houseplant can cause significantly ***MORE*** attenuation than a plaster wall. I used to install a lot of outdoor point-to-point and point-to-multipoint bridges back when I operated an ISP, and we knew that tree leaves were seasonal chaff clouds that attenuated and dispersed any WiFi signal that you might try to shoot through them.
> we knew that tree leaves were seasonal chaff clouds that attenuated and dispersed any WiFi signal that you might try to shoot through them.
Yes had this problem in spades when deploying WiFi in Soho Square back in 2006 - brilliant reception during the winter, but summer when the trees were in full leaf..., also your typical passing London bus disrupted signals... Outdoor Wifi particularly on the streets presents an interesting set of challenges.
Between 5 GHz and now 6 GHz wifi bands. I had occasional wifi issues and through much debugging figured out it was when I'd locked in on 2.4 GHz, and a bluetooth source or neighbor or whatever was interfering. So I simply disabled 2.4 GHz on my router and set up a second router on the other side of the house to insure full coverage (since 5 GHz doesn't propagate as well through walls) and now I always have strong signals anywhere in my house or backyard (because one is near a window looking out at the backyard)
"So I simply disabled 2.4 GHz on my router and set up a second router on the other side of the house to insure full coverage "
Initially I had the wifi in the office, but, duh, everything in my office is plugged into the switch so I moved the wifi to the middle(ish) of the house which gave me some coverage in the garage until I ran a long lead out there and added a 5 port switch for more stuff.
I’ve also in the past encountered devices that “stick” to,the 2.4 GHz rather than switch to the 5 GHz band. I put it down to old radio chips. By limiting the 2.4 GHz radio by disabling 802.11b and channel speeds of less thann 11MHz, I largely got around the problem. A problem I’ve not got around is that many US devices only support the US approved channels and so fail to find and connect to channels available in the rest of the world. Hence this can also cause device specific problems that are difficult to track down.
"A leaf that has a high moisture content acts like a mirror at that frequency, reflecting the signal, and a leafy houseplant can cause significantly ***MORE*** attenuation than a plaster wall. "
Not reflect, but absorb. That's how a microwave oven works and at pretty much the same frequency too.
My elderly mother lives in a 600 year old cottage with cob walls (mud/straw/gravel/dung), 3+ feet thick, even some of the internal ones. It's actually a great building material but the wifi signal doesn't go through it.
Recently she got confused and complained about it to her cellphone company (not her ISP) because she doesn't understand the difference between the wifi signal and the cellphone signal. Being the opportunistic scumbags they are, they changed her cellphone to the most expensive tariff and told her that will make it better.
I tried to explain to her that was wrong. The "internet" comes from the black box connected to the landline and is not related to the mobile phone company, even though she uses her phone to access the internet. And in any case, the problem is the walls, not the service. So then she made a bunch of other phone calls saying I don't know what to whom. And the end result was that her cell phone service, landline and internet all got cut off at the end of the month leaving her completely isolated and unable to contact anyone. It was a comedy of errors, but somewhat worrying to see how easily a vulnerable old person can get themselves into such difficulty.
It was a massive pain the ass the sort it all out and I've told her that next time I visit I'm going to solve the problem by installing a bunch of wifi access points around the house and in the meantime she's not to call the phone companies for any reason.
> all got cut off at the end of the month leaving her completely isolated and unable to contact
We had similar 'fun' with my mom. My advice: take-over her accounts. Yes, this is un-fun when you live afar or they don't want to send billing to a different address, or insist the account be in the name of the occupant. But you already visualize the dangers.
My electric bill can be rigged so a '3rd party' (typically an adult child) gets notice of any change or delinquency.
> My electric bill can be rigged so a '3rd party' (typically an adult child) gets notice of any change or delinquency.
Recommend also ensuring an email account that is not the one linked to the OAP’s ISP is associated with key accounts (eg. Bank account). You will appreciate it when dealing with the estate.
"Powerline network kit, which uses the mains wiring, is pretty much as fast and reliable as Ethernet these days."
Powerline kit can/likely will also result in radio transmissions (a house's wiring can act as an antenna).
In the early days of Powerline there were 2 main chip suppliers and at least one of those did not produce chips in compliance with regulations (there was supposed to be a "notch" implemented to avoid radio harmonics in certain frequency ranges). Then BT deployed lots of Powerline adaptors using these chipsets which occasionally interfered with Ham Radio and more importantly wih Airport radars.
The Register covered this at the time: https://www.theregister.com/2011/04/05/ofcom_plt_response/
Not seen any negative RF interference reports with Homeplug AV2 devices (ie. The stuff in the shops that support Gbps speeds). Given the AV2 Standard has been around since 2012, I would expect there to have been studies and reports.
It s a bit like the microwave oven interfering with the WiFi; if your oven is interfering with the WiFi it is because it is leaking microwave energy… From my 20+ years experience I’ve not encountered a properly working microwave oven causing WiFi interference.
Aside: it is from the late 1990s early 2000’s that the idea of only using non-overlapping 802.11 channels arose, something that changes to signalling has largely rendered obsolete, yet many still cripple their 802.11ax routers with this allocation policy.
As a kid, my folks had some powerline intercoms. One on the top floor (3-story house), one in the kitchen on the ground floor, one out in the garage. Worked well for years - until the day we were hearing other folks' conversations.
Apparently the neighbors 4 houses away got a brand new set, and the signals made it all the way through both sets of breaker boxes. Simple solution was for one family to use channel A and the other to use channel B. (Good thing there were just 2 families using them, as there were only 2 channels!)
On a related topic, we're all familiar with how TVs would suddenly get clear reception when you touch the aerial to adjust it or come very close, but when you move away satisfied it all goes fuzzy again. When I was younger I figured plants might do the same, and used to have my radio connected to an aloe vera plant which gave perfect reception.
A proper mesh system uses a separate channel for interconnect, although I find the best approach is still a proper cable if possible. The benefit of a mesh is that it doesn't need to spend 50% of its time listening to signals it then has to repeat, and has fewer issues with signal interference as it's designed for it.
The common WiFi mesh systems all use one channel, which at highest speed is 3 channels or all of the 2.4GHz.
It's not really a mesh if an out-of-band connection is used, and indeed that's far better. Suitable wireless, fibre or free space optical can replace ethernet cable between airpoints.
I've known about this issue for at least a decade: plants interfere with radio waves...
After a few minutes of "re-search" I found this 2003 article: https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2002RS002758
There are probably articles of similar nature that pre-date this but I couldn't be bothered wasting more than a few minutes...
Granted the above article is over 20 years old, the vegetation of concern is trees, the aerials are much larger and transmit powers much higher than WiFi, but one of the investigated radio frequencies is near WiFi's 2.4GHz...
So, IMHO, Broadband Genie's "news" is not new... (And why didn't El Reg pick this up?)
In this world of "AI regenerated stories" I have to wonder if this "news" may have been generated from "AI research"?
