People put their routers in jail to protect themselves from harmless Wi-Fi

Please do not put your internet router in a Faraday cage. Please do not put your internet router in a Faraday cage.

If you are reading this, as someone who uses the internet, it might sound obvious. A Faraday cage, after all, prevents electromagnetic radiation and signals from escaping. Putting one around your router would, by very similar physics, avoid these same radio waves wear your internet reach your devices.

And yet, a whole cottage industry of crooks looking to make a quick buck selling “router shields” that claim to fix the problem and protect you and your loved ones from your Wi-Fi has emerged this week.

The catch is smart – Faraday’s cages sell for pretty ridiculous prices for metal cans (typically $ 70 to $ 100 on Amazon), which means sellers are probably making a huge profit here.

And the products themselves, while based entirely on the conspiracy, don’t entirely lie, unless it’s their claims that these boxes “shouldn’t affect signal range and speed at all.” Internet”.

Putting what effectively amounts to a Faraday cage around your router to block electromagnetic radiation will do just that. This will block almost all of your router’s signal, as many funny Amazon reviewers have learned complaining about degradation in signal strength and internet speeds:

It’s just as ironic that critics are complaining that the shields don’t work at all and their internet works just fine:

This is probably due to poorly designed cages – some of them just appear to be overpriced mesh storage boxes. (Equally amusing are the concerned sellers about cheaper “counterfeit” copies of their shields, who have made a habit of bragging about their “original” designs or American origins to attract buyers.)

The plot has been going on for some time, with some Amazon listings dating back several years, but catapulted into the limelight this week after a viral tweet from a Twitter user. @AnsgarTOdinson. Recent (and equally absurd) conspiracies on 5G cellular networks – which operate using similar swathes of the electromagnetic spectrum as Wi-Fi routers – have also likely contributed to the spread of the conspiracy.

This is all completely irrelevant: routers born emit harmful electromagnetic radiation.

As we have written several times here at The edge, almost all wireless technologies – be it AM / FM radio, mobile phone networks for calling, LTE, 5G, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and even the infrared remote control you use to turn on your TV – are based on the transmission and reception of signals broadcast over part of the electromagnetic spectrum.

When we talk about “electromagnetic radiation” we are simply describing a wave of photons traveling through space. Even light – what you use to see – is a form of electromagnetic radiation, and harmless too (although it has a much higher frequency than any radio or microwave used for cell phones or the Internet).

Wi-Fi – and 5G internet and all of those aforementioned forms of wireless communication – are fundamentally similar in how they work and are a form of what’s known as non-ionizing radiation. Non-ionizing means it doesn’t have enough energy to move electrons from atoms and break down cells, which is the kind of danger you probably think of when the word “radiation” comes to mind. But it’s just not physically possible for your internet router to do that, and your router is no more of a danger to you than a TV remote or your car radio.

Look, I understand. “Radiation” is a scary word, and the idea that your Internet router is sending out invisible, harmful energy could be concerning, if true from a distance. But luckily, based on all of the current scientific evidence (as described by the Food and Drug Administration, the National Cancer Institute, and the American Cancer Society), that “danger” is just not there.

Of course, there is an inherent tragedy in debunking this router conspiracy: The edge is a website and anyone who uses one of these router shields may not be able to access the internet to read it.