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Google’s self-designed office swallows Wi-Fi “like the Bermuda Triangle”
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Mar 2024
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Are they not equipped to deal with that? You'd think large metal surfaces are pretty common, so it'd be a bigger issue if so.
Well, straight metal surfaces are a whole different story from concave metal surfaces.
The former causes interference in a line in one specific direction, with roughly the width and height of said metal surface.
Concave metal surfaces on the other hand, can easily blast a whole room, depending on how concave they are.
And I'm a bit out of my water here, but I believe, modern WiFi does try to
But yeah, ultimately this can't be an exact science. Recipients move around. Interferences move around. You still need additional EM-waves to advertise yourself as WiFi to disconnected devices. A reflecting interference may be situated behind a recipient, where you do need to send signals to.
And of course, no one expects ~~the Spanish Inquisition~~ Google's house of mirrors, where any misdirected EM-wave will interfere with everything else in the room. That just ramps up any imperfections in WiFi by a lot...
This design looks like you could get more than one roof segment involved, too, especially if there's a lot of traffic. I didn't know that they actually manage spacial relationships like that, but I guess it makes sense. I suppose that's why the extra antennas on some models.
In theory, a radio reflection off something non-flat can be a treated a bit like an extra point source. My curved tea kettle won't mess with wi-fi, because a reflection off it just looks like a straight but lossy path that's the sum of the distances involved. If something's a wavelength across weirder things can happen, of course, but wi-fi is in relatively short bands for the most part, and there's more than one so it can just switch if it's in a dead spot. A wi-fi signal will also be modulated pretty fast, though, so now you have to think in frequency space as well, I'm not sure how that works.
Google's hipster building is on a scale that's very different from a kettle, but at least as complex geometrically, so maybe that's where the gap in access point design lies. They expect small distortions and big perfect reflections.