Chicken wire blocks WiFi signals

Got an old house? Got Wi-Fi? Discovered you can't get the Wi-Fi signal to travel anywhere in the house, so that you have to resort to HomePlugs to send the signal via the mains? Then you've got plenty in common with people in San Francisco and other parts of the US who have just the same problem.

The culprit? Plaster-and-lath walls - specifically when the lath (or base structure) of the wall is chicken wire or similar corrugated wire, to which the plaster is added to create the wall. Such walls are sometimes internal, often external, but always death to Wi-Fi signals because the wire acts as a Faraday cage, killing the signal.

Hence a long and interesting piece at the Wall Street Journal - entitled Culprit in Wi-Fi Failure: Chicken Wire - which looks at the problem, particularly in San Francisco, where the combination of desire to use Wi-Fi and wire lath is particularly high. Plasterboard (which Americans call "drywall"), which doesn't have wire components, doesn't block it to anything like the same extent.

Read more -here-

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