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Comment by pishpash | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, something so imprecise isn't likely to work as he thinks. Proper shielding can do a lot more. If you made your house/apartment a Faraday cage and eliminated neighbors' AP's that would already solve most problems.

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> If you made your house/apartment a Faraday cage

Might put a crimp on your cell phone reception ...

Is there a way to build your Faraday cage to block out wifi wavelengths but not cell phone ones? How far apart are they?

You could likely block anything over 2.3 GHz and get away with it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cellular_frequencies_in_the_US

unless you have Sprint ;-)

This is usually done with a femtocell.

[0] https://www.att.com/att/microcell/

I've always wondered what it would be like to have paint like this as an exterior primer

https://www.lessemf.com/paint.html (Warning: this site gets a little silly)

Just move to the 5.8ghz band. There's an extra 50MHz of bandwidth available and these frequencies are much more strongly attenuated by walls. There's also usually much less interference from other unlicensed equipment like cordless phones, baby monitors and microwave ovens, although you can occasionally get hosed by a dodgy Chinese video sender operating at well above the legal limit.

You might need to replace a couple of older pieces of equipment, but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than turning your house into a Faraday cage.

I can see this working well, unless LoS goes through one of those walls. There's a metal mesh in most of the walls of my house (putting two routers directly opposite each other on either side of an internal wall will cut the signal strength to about 60%), and trying to get a reliable signal because of the shape of the house (roughly L-shaped) was a nightmare (line of sight was through two external walls).

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