Yes, but then it's slower for your computer to talk back to your Wi-Fi, so it ends up cancelling out
Push-Pull Config
RoRo stations. Roll on, roll off/out. The internet isn't a highway, it's a series of bullet trains in tube tunnels.
I wonder if anyone thinks OpenTTD would be more fun with a cyberspace theme? I know there's a neon grid grf (mod)...
Anyway, if this was a suitable solution for WiFi, we wouldn't need wired connections. That said, you can cut open a drink can to turn a WiFi router's signal into a focused beam using the aluminum, iirc.
Full duplex airflow signal enhancement
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.
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. 🙄
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…
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
On the contrary, given the premise its a smart observation from an unknownledged person.
“Wifi is waves in the air” is very very wrong but as it appears it’s what this person was thought to believe. Given that they trust this information the conclusion makes perfect sense.
The only “dumb” here is whoever explain wifi like this to them.
So what the post really amounts to is. “I applied actual reasoning to the information i was provided as fact and my conclusion seemed strange, so i will ask on no stupid questions to figure out whats really going on”
More intelligent than the majority of internet users.
"I don't know, can anyone help me learn?" gets so much respect from me. Incredibly powerful mindset.
it obv goes through the ether
This is not stupid at all. If Wi-Fi used matter instead of magnetic fields to propagate (like sound waves), a fan would affect it. Understanding magnetic fields is anything but intuitive.
Agreed, it's just someone trying to learn.
Alternatively I would guess if fans improved the speed we'd have wifi fans throughout the house. Gaming wifi fans that sound like an airplane taking off with blinding LEDs
Imagine...
Not at all in this case though! Or rather, it depends on your perspective.
"Why doesn't electricity leak out the outlet?" is a good question, if you know nothing about electricity.
"Why doesn't electricity leak out the outlet?" is a little stupid, if you know a little about electricity.
"Why doesn't electricity leak out the outlet?" is a great question if you know a bit more about electricity (because it does leak out, it's just that 50/60Hz doesn't couple to freespace well unless you have a colossal antenna).
As to this question, light in moving media: https://preprints.opticaopen.org/articles/preprint/Fizeau_Experiment_Investigating_the_Speed_of_Light_in_Moving_Media/25441108?file=45147313
I mean technically the weather influences your ping, since the waves travel slower at higher air pressure
Edit: Accidentally got it the wrong way around
I’m not sure if you’re being sarcastic but this is not true. Electromagnetic waves travel fastest in a vacuum, so the presence of air would slow it down very slightly and I would expect higher air pressure would slow it down further again only incredibly slightly because the electromagnetic waves would be traveling through a medium less efficient and more different than a vacuum.
Of course I’m making an assumption that you were using wireless signals. For all I know, you could have some weird acoustic link in which case you’d be absolutely right.
They would travel slower at high pressure and high temperature due to more interactions. Low temp and low pressure are the opposite. Sound is faster with high pressure and more complicated on temperature.
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.
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)
What if i put the router in front of an open window, open the window behind my computer and put a fan between the two ?
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
Everyone know that.
Not inherently stupid question; they just don't know that radio waves don't travel through air but through space.
But air is empty space?! /s
they just don't know that radio waves don't travel through air but through space
does this mean radio waves can go to mars? if so, why don’t we ride them to mars?
You'd need a very small saddle.
It's not much of a stupid question even given that - for a refractive medium, speed of light can change with its movement. Though for air it'll be extremely hard to directly notice; it has n≈1.0003 so speed of light in air is already 0.9997c, and increasing it to, say, 0.9998c would require moving the air at 0.166c.
Stupid laws of nature, making everything cool super hard and expensive!
What is space exactly?
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 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
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.
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.
With less matter for the photons to interact with, I assume the WiFi's SNR would be improved. If fewer data frames need to be retransmitted at the link layer (WiFi), I figure the apparent bitrate at the IP level might actually be improved!
Actually, I would not be shocked if WiFi itself adapts to conditions, e.g. by sending less data per frame with more error correction bits when SNR is already low.
(Not a networking expert, I am just bullshitting.)
I like this question tbh
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.
Yes but you have to put a slit in front of it so the wifi waves turn into wifi particles.
Gotta get me one of those oscillating routers.
They do kind of oscillate, just very very quickly.
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 :)
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
Not gonna lie, I thought about that, but I didn't wanna risk sounding stupid, so I just google it instead of posting it on a forum. Luckily I didn't actually make a forum post.
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.
I was an adjunct instructor at a local technical college teaching computer hardware courses. One student asked me if a hard drive that was full weighed more than a hard drive that was empty.
I hope your answer was as thorough as this one: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/31326/is-a-hard-drive-heavier-when-it-is-full/31329#31329
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.
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.
Check on Amazon for a "Space fan".
Just have a miniature wormhole connect your PC directly to the server
Waves in the electromagnetic field that permeates all of space, along with many other fields with different topologies and particles.
This might sound stupid, but that's because it is.
Remember: These people vote.
Reminder: most voters are the people.
No but if you fill the room with water then it should be way faster
I hope this is the final straw for OP to finally delete the app that shall not be named
If it changes the air pressure, changing the refractive index, it will affect how fast the waves will travel. If you put it behind the router blowing towards the computer, does that increase the pressure? Then it would slow down I think. But this would only make a difference for a single wave packet; any real connection sends many packets and would be limited by the frequency of packets sent.
It is amazing with how little to none in education is sufficient to finish school nowadays.
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.
How do you know that redditor finished school? There are kids on the Internet.
yes.
Technically?
No.
Yeah but it's gonna scramble your signal, then send it spinning outwards.
So if I put a fan behind a source of light, shouldn't that make the particles faster?
