PhD student maps his apartment's wifi dead zones using physics equation

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A home's Wi-Fi dead zones are, to most of us, a problem solved with guesswork. Your laptop streams just fine in this corner of the bedroom, but not the adjacent one; this arm of the couch is great for uploading photos, but not the other one. You avoid these places, and where the Wi-Fi works becomes a factor in the wear patterns of your home. In an effort to better understand, and possibly eradicate, his Wi-Fi dead zones, one man took the hard way: he solved the Helmholtz equation.

Cole found in his simulation he could get pretty good coverage even with his router in one corner of the room, but could get "tendrils of Internet goodness" everywhere if he placed the router right in the center of the apartment. In a simulation where he gave the concrete some absorption potential, he found a map more like what he expected: excellent reception immediately around the router, and beams that shone into various rooms with periodic strong spots from the waves' interference.

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