Wi-Fi in the apartment is most important: physics will help you choose a place for the router

Jason Cole, a graduate student at Imperial College London, proposed calculating the ideal place for a Wi-Fi router in a home using a strictly scientific method - through Maxwell's equations. Manually solving these equations for a long time and dreary - but fortunately, a modern smartphone can cope with numerical solutions. As a result, Cole made an application that helps to plan the ideal location of the router in the home.

Although Cole, in his studies, deals with the interaction of electromagnetic radiation with plasma, the issue of the propagation of radiation for a given room configuration is of not only scientific, but also purely practical interest. In one day, several hundred people have already downloaded the application.


Experimenting with the results of his work, Cole saw two characteristic patterns. Firstly, the evidence supported by the calculations says that ideally the router should be in direct line of sight from the places where the connected devices will be located. Secondly, the effect of standing waves is observed in apartments. Radiation is reflected from walls and objects, and is superimposed on itself, which sometimes leads to complete disappearance, and sometimes to amplification of the wave. These areas of good and bad reception alternate. From this it follows that even with a slight shift of the router, you can achieve a large change in the signal level in the place where this signal is most needed.



The only minus of the application is that it requires downloading an image with a pre-made apartment plan, where empty space is indicated and walls made of different materials are marked in different colors. But other applications will help you make the plan — the top ten in the opinion of the home management site, or the efficient and easy-to-use RoomScan application .