this post was submitted on 15 Jul 2025
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This can actually be beneficial if your router is right at the corner of your house. The foil acts as a reflector for some of the radiation that would've been wasted, and thus improves the signal quality within your house.
To actually be beneficial as a reflector, the foil would need to be a specific distance from the antenna, which should be a certain fraction of the wavelength. Source: I used to make parabolic reflectors out of milk cartons about twenty years ago.
This is basic interference physics.
I am 80% sure this is a net loss with modern mu-mimo radios, and it will absolutely trash your phy rate
wat
MU-MIMO (Multiple-User Multiple In Multiple Out) does [math] to assist in directing signal to multiple clients at once via multipathing, which this reflector would fuck with the math of in (I think) a detrimental way. Regardless of its impact on that technology, higher-end wifi phy rates (the negotiated modulation rate between 2 stations, i.e. the wifi access point/router and your phone) would get shredded by having a reflector bouncing signal between the multiple antennas, forcing clients into artificially lower speeds for a [potential] marginal boost to gain.
This stopped being a helpful thing to do somewhere around the transition between wifi 4 and 5 (802.11n --> 802.11ac)
I remember going to a LAN that got its wifi from a local library via collander-boosting. Those were the days, and carrying around CRT monitors was sort of like exercise
tbf i'd imagine a lot of people still have wifi 4
What if I'm doing it to block signals from roughly half the 60 other APs with half a dozen devices each I have broadcasting nearby?
Then it'll do literally exactly the same thing as above, but with a lower noise floor than otherwise. Whether lowering airtime contention (or, rather, lowering airtime contention for one station while not doing so for others, unless you're talking about putting a layer of foil wallpaper up on a wall lmao) in exchange for all that is a net benefit for you, I couldn't say. If it's all wifi6 or higher though, I wouldn't bother.
That is near exactly what I was considering, I live between an apartment building and a park, more or less.