this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2023
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Isn't WiFi technically light based? It's all just electromagnetic radiation
From the Wikipedia article on light:
But also:
So yeah, depends on your usage of the term “light”, but colloquially (and in this context), it’s referring to visible light.
Radio.
Radio and light are the same thing from a physics standpoint, just different ranges of electromagnetic spectrum.
So phones and communication towers are basically flashlights blinking at each other using invisible light, to which walls/buildings and stuff are translucent :)
Or like x-ray is pretty much a camera flash that can shine through bodies.
Buildings and stuff aren't all that translucent to radio waves. You can't just point two radios at each other with a building between them and expect them to "see" each other. They can bounce and reflect off them like light would off mirrors and reflective surfaces and even be bent by changes in the atmosphere itself, though.
A powerful enough radio, though, is kinda like when you can see light shining through your arm if you hold a flashlight to it.
That’s why I didn’t use “transparent”. Translucent is exactly what they are though, with wood being more see-through and concrete less so. But a regular concrete wall still lets enough through not to drop most connections.
@fearout And wifi Mimo used reflection of the walls to propagate the signal, just like light bouncing off white surfaces and reflecting further away.
@wave_walnut @peter @elscallr @Kolanaki
Eh. It's less radio transmitters are like flashlights more flashlights are transmitters.
@peter Yeah, that's a bit confusing. Wifi is based on radio spectrum, and Lifi is based partly on infrared. And infrared light has more energy. So I guess that's one of the downsides probably, that it requires more energy to produce that? I'm not an expert or anything like that.