Depends on the direction the fan is facing. If it’s blowing towards you, that increases air pressure in front of it, which means more things for photons to interact with and a lower speed of light, thus slower wifi. Away from you would decrease the pressure and result in faster wifi due to the increased speed of light. Theoretically at least. I don’t think this effect is measurable.
Edit: thinking about it, the electromagnetic noise from a fan motor would likely be worse than the benefit. You might even be able to detect that
It is amazing with how little to none in education is sufficient to finish school nowadays.
How do you know that redditor finished school? There are kids on the Internet.
I learned more from the internet than everything that public school taught me. That’s not to say we should stop funding school, but in fact, we should fund it better, and have more qualified teachers.
If I make an analogy between a wikipedia article, and the knowledge I learned. I would say that public school taught the eqivalent of the summary paragraph at the top of a wikipedia page, while the internet taught me the rest of the page. That’s how much school just don’t teach.
Example, School didn’t teach: (This is the USA btw)
- Ranked Choice voting (or any alternative voting method, for that matter)
- National Popular Vote Interstate Compact
- Citizen’s United ruling
- Although they did teach 5th & 6th amendments and Miranda Warning, they didn’t be specific and teach the fact that you have to specifically invoke your right to silence. Just remaining silent itself can be used as evidence of guilt.
Amonst many things
School definitely doesn’t teach how wifi works (and to be honest, I thought about the wifi/fan thing too), or even how technology works in general. School never taugh about the fact that you shouldn’t ignore HTTPS warnings. I’m pretty sure like 99% of my school would just instictively click pass an HTTPS warning and just get their info stolen, although we do have HSTS now so we should be better now, but still, there are many other phishing that almost all of my school-mates would fall for, and they wouldn’t even think to scan the sender address or do any verification that its legit.
My (European) school education at least taught me that speed of light (and therefore other electromagnetic radiation, too) can be assumed to be the speed of light without any measurable difference applied by the medium it is passing through.
The Wifi isn’t waves made of air, the wifi is waves of the electromagnetic spectrum, similar to visible light, and they travel faster than you can perceive.
So no.
But you can do something similar with a microwave oven. It’s just that any signal making it through the radiation of the oven would be disfigured and useless.
I mean, that was my first thought… but would there be a measurable difference?
I mean lets be clear, with a fan you’re adding like 8 mph to something going 299,792,458 meters per second. You won’t notice anything.
But like, vacuum vs glass vs glass moving half the speed of light, could be an interesting what if. Relativity is always where my mind glosses over in physics.
Unless the air particles make real contact with the photons then you’re not adding anything to anything, and the ones that do will be deflected.
Imagine a rock in space coming close to hitting a planet, or even entering a solar system at all. Similar scale.
I think it’s important to point out as well that there is a mesiarble difference between between the permittivity of free space and air. But to your point the difference is quite small: e_r air is 1.0006 whereas e_r freespace is 1.
While temperature and pressure do have an effect on e_r air I don’t know enough to say that net movement of the particles in one direction would have a measurable effect.
My instinct is no.Looks like lukewarm_ozone proved me wrong. https://lemmy.today/comment/13053868
Yeah but it’s gonna scramble your signal, then send it spinning outwards.
Sort of a serious answer because I’m bored: You’re thinking of speeding up the air when what you should be thinking about is speeding up the waves. But then your waves are reaching you plenty fast already with latency being in the single digit ms range. Not much of a point in trying to accelerate that, really. You won’t notice anyway.
If you feel like your internet connection via Wi-Fi is slow then the bottleneck is probably not with the Wi-Fi part of your network but the Internet Access Point behind it. Or even further down the line.
Now this is based on the assumption that you are in a fairly typical network environment, i.e. using semi-current hardware with moderate, if any, electromagnetic interference in the area. If you’re living right next to a high voltage transformer station and using a router from 2008 then, yes, you’re going to have Wi-Fi performance issues.
But in most cases, people complaining about “slow Wi-Fi” are actually suffering from Internet connectivity issues.
Think of it this way: If you enjoy your McDonald’s from the local franchise but you can only get 100 burgers per hour from them (of course you need MOAR!) then upgrading your 320hp Camaro to a 400hp Mustang is not going to enable you to pick up appreciably more burgers from the drive through in the same amount of time.
There are plenty of things in a normal home that can cause serious signal attenuation (just installed new energy efficient windows? whoops! those IR blocking coatings severely attenuate microwave signals too). Poor AP placement is a very common cause of “slow wifi” and has nothing to do with your internet uplink.
Again, you point out why “normal” is an iffy notion to begin with. Thank you for elaborating instead of just downvoting. 🙂
Failing to fully utilize the existing antenna diversity options on modern routers/APs might be another common cause that comes to mind.
Not entirely true.
In an apartment in the middle of a city, noisy neighbours can be a problem.In those cases, it’s best to jump to 5 GHz, and leave the 2.4 band alone.
Except if you have an ECOVACS cleaning robot which refuses to work with modern 5GHz networks. I actually had to install a Wi-Fi bridge to get around that limitation; thankfully, I still had one lying around. Helped me get a better signal for my phone in the bathroom as well.
But thank you for adding this information. Congestion due to interference from other networks (I guess that’s what you meant) can definitely be a factor as well. I guess that’s the problem with the notion of “normal” that I employed rather carelessly.
Sidenote: the fact that your Wi-Fi still works in those conditions at all instead of shutting down goes back to pioneering research done by actress-cum-scientist Hedy Lamarr during WW2. Amazing woman.
which refuses to work with modern 5GHz networks.
Companies that make IoT devices do this so they can save a bit of money. It lets them use lower end, cheaper wifi chips (or left over older-generation chips that they can buy at a discount). I’m not really a hardware person but apparently 2.4Ghz wifi radios are a lot simpler than 5Ghz ones. Apparently they’re also $2-$3 cheaper which adds up when you’re producing a lot of units.
Also, the 5Ghz band differs per country. For example, some channels are authorized in the USA but not in Europe. Some companies stick to 2.4Ghz to avoid having to make anything region-specific.
and you can speedup your upload by switching the fan direction
Fan facing up for upload and down for download, very intuitive.
don’t forget to compensate gravity
Technically?
No.
Gotta get me one of those oscillating routers.
They do kind of oscillate, just very very quickly.
yes but pages will render kinda wavy i use a box fan myself for maximum speed
WiFi is waves in space, not air.
Followup: Can I get a fan that moves space instead of air? I need to make my wifi faster.
Check on Amazon for a “Space fan”.
Just have a miniature wormhole connect your PC directly to the server
You can define your fan to be moving space and the pushing of air is the side-effect.
What poster above meant is that wifi is electromagnetic waves, so it does not care whether air is present or not. Air does not significantly hinder the propagation of electromagnetic waves. What you could do to speed up your wifi, in theory, is to fill your living room with argon. Argon has a lower refractive index than air, so the waves can travel faster. The downside is that you won’t be able to breathe.
Followup: So I need to get a fan with this symbol on it: ☢️?
There’s a few on eBay, but the sellers are all Russian and I’m not sure if they’re scams or not.
I guess I’ll look for radiation fan on Amazon.
Build your own fan out of bananas and you have a radiation fan.
K, umm I mean 40 K.
So SCUBA for inside the house breathing while gaming, zoom meeting, etc. That’s totally doable.
SCBA would be enough.
Just get a tube of argon that you can connect from your wifi ap to your device so the waves can travel faster through the tube
Waves in the electromagnetic field that permeates all of space, along with many other fields with different topologies and particles.
If you can create a vacuum with said fan, it can be faster.
Maybe if you made this vacuum encapsulated in a line. Surrounded by shielded metal and plastic.
So if I put a fan behind a source of light, shouldn’t that make the particles faster?
No but if you fill the room with water then it should be way faster
This might sound stupid, but that’s because it is.
I like this question tbh
