Yes, but then it’s slower for your computer to talk back to your Wi-Fi, so it ends up cancelling out
Interestingly, this could be true and you could never find out experimentally iirc.
I watched a veritasium video about the 1 way speed of light vs 2 way that talked about it.
I watched the same video!
I was right about to disagree and type “wait this only applies to light” but then I remembered: radio is light.
Crazy to think about that!
It is nuts. It goes to show how far science goes proving things through deductions rather than direct observation. So much science is done that way.
I think that there would be some infinite energy glitches if it was actually true that light was faster 1 direction than another, so I think the assumption is a good one. But still fun facts
There are some stupid questions.
Tbf, it’s not like physics stuff is always obvious, especially when dealing with relativity or quantum mechanics. It just feels obvious if you’ve already learned about the research that’s already been done.
It isn’t even remotely intuitive that light should have a max speed that can’t be added to by moving its source relative to other things. Plus, light does interact with matter, but it can only be slowed down by it.
So less a stupid question and more just one that isn’t educated about something.
Yeah yeah, I know. I was mostly just kidding. Everything is magic if you’re ignorant and we shouldn’t shit on people for not knowing something and props to them for asking and seeking knowledge and all that.
But it’s really sad that very basic science like radio waves which are introduced in 5th or 6th grade could be so completely misunderstood.
I remember my 6th grade science class having a lively 15 minute discussion about whether or not rockets can work in space since there’s no air…. We’re looking at videos of rockets working in space and then debating whether or not they do. 🙄
Even less intuitively, the fan would increase the air pressure between the router and receiver, slowing light down slightly. So it would end up (imperceptibly) slowing the signal down.
Yeah, what if I’m moving my router at the speed of light, not so intuitive now
Quantum physics is not logical, every other field of physics is! Shame that instead of logic we are taught fucking equations, as if we could look up logical conclusions like equations…
Esp those pushed to devices with the form factor of a remote control, running the official reddit app
Oh, wow. You really triggered them this time.
Yeah, but it evens out since now your messages going back to the router have to swim upstream.
No, the fan will blow the packets all over the place, which is fine for UDP, but any TCP/IP connection will suffer. Place the fan in front of the router so that the blades will catch any dropped packets and throw them back into the datastream.
uh, hi. If you place the blades in front of the router, it will start chopping the packets before they even reach. You need to use an bladeless fan
Alright so I’ve now got a router using cell signal hardwired into a Roomba randomly roaming the halls so everyone gets shitty connections all the time.
Just gotta adjust the MTU and fan RPM
that sweet spot
Everyone know that.
Yes, but the tailwind becomes a headwind on the way back to the router so you won’t see any actual speed changes. Putting a fan on both ends will cancel each other out too.
You need to change all the gaseous air out for either liquid or a solid as waves propagate faster through them. You should start with filling your house with liquid oxygen as a nice half step so you still have something to breathe easily, as solids are a bit more tricky.
The general idea is correct, but since we’re dealing with electronagnetic waves, they travel slower in any medium. So pumping out all the air of the room would technically make your wifi faster.
Liquid oxygen has (I think) a refractive index of about 1.2, so it would make the signals 20% slower (still very fast)
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
Yes, but only in one direction and if you use UDP instead of TCP. Also your MTU needs to be small enough for the packages to fit between the blades of the fan, otherwise that causes package fragmentation.
/s
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
Yes but you have to put a slit in front of it so the wifi waves turn into wifi particles.
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.
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.
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.
I like this question tbh
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.
It’s not 1 way traffic. Signals go both ways. To increase your wifi speeds, have 1 fan blow from your router to your device and 1 fan from your device blow towards your router. Signals go faster in warm air so make sure to pump up the thermostat. It also goes faster with less CO2 in the air so make sure to open all windows (unless you own a Mac). Lower moisture in the air also improves speeds, so crank your AC on max. Also placing both your router and device in rice helps.
device in rice
Say that in any linux forum :)
If you had a fan blowing out the window, it could slightly reduce the density of the air in your house, leading to a tiny increase in the speed of light through it, so that would make the waves technically faster, but by a vanishingly small margin
It wouldn’t increase the bitrate of your router at all, so it wouldn’t make a difference, but the waves would be faster
Bitrate wouldn’t change, but it would reduce latency by a tiny amount.
and you can speedup your upload by switching the fan direction
