A Better Internet Experience Through Tin Foil?

When the time came for us Disciples of Bloggism to move into our new home in Beaverton, Oregon, back at the end of last year, one of the first decisions we had to make was choosing an internet service provider.  Now, we had a ton of different choices, and since Rob and I are the kind of people who need reliable, nearly 24/7 internet coverage when we’re at home, this was a relatively important decision for us.  When we last lived together, a couple years back, we had bundled a home phone line and broadband internet together through Qwest.  It wasn’t terrible service, but we weren’t exactly blown away, and our main motivation for going with Qwest last time was the relatively cheap price when you bought the phone line with the internet service.  However, this time around we both agreed that a landline would be impractical, since we both have our cell phones on us 99% of the time and our coverage in that area is great.  Comcast was an option, although we had heard plenty of horror stories from friends and acquaintances with Comcast whose internet connections were less reliable than they would have liked.  After some shopping around, we decided to try out Clear, a relatively new service here in Portland, from the Seattle-based service provider Clearwire.

If you’re not familiar with Clear, they offer what they refer to as “mobile internet” through their “WiMax 4G technology.”  Expanding on the “access the web through your cell phone” trend that’s been driving the development of new phone hardware and software for the past few years, Clear provides relatively high-speed wireless access to the internet remotely in several cities around the country.  They started out in Seattle, then added towers in Portland, and have begun expanding their reach beyond the Northwest, with plans to peddle their wireless wares in almost a hundred more cities over the next year or two.  Besides offering wireless-receiving modems for home internet use, Clear provides the option of purchasing little receivers you can plug into your laptops to connect to the Web almost anywhere around town – this mobile option, and the relatively low price of their service plans, were a couple of the main reasons we chose to get our internet access through Clear.

However, this is starting to sound like a paid endorsement for the company’s internet service, so let me get to the point: Clear’s coverage offers both the benefits and downsides of any major cell phone service provider – if you have a mobile access receiver, you can supposedly go all around town with a reliable internet connection, but the service is very spotty once you leave the heart of downtown, and lots of things can interfere with your signal strength, trees and buildings included.  We have yet to make use of the supposed mobility offered by Clear, and have only set up a home modem for our local internet needs – and since we’re out West of Beaverton, somewhat in “the boonies” relative to the heart of downtown Portland, our connection has usually been questionable at best.  Review after review has said more or less the same thing – that the ability to access the internet at a reasonable speed all over the city is an awesome feature, albeit one with a cost at this relatively early stage of the technological game: put a couple of walls between you and the open air, and the signal goes to shit.  Bump the modem or turn the antenna on the receiver the wrong way, and the signal goes to shit.  Hell, if you even walk across the street from a high-signal area you may find yourself in a proverbial dead zone.  Still, the potential mobility may be worth it for some, especially if you’ll be spending your time mainly in areas with moderate-to-high coverage.  We have yet to be so lucky, even though Clear’s map of coverage in the Portland area clearly (no pun intended) shows that we should be doing just fine:

If we put the modem in its most natural position in our home, out of the way of normal foot traffic and out of sight, near the wireless router and next to similar home electronics, our signal is at best one bar out of a possible five.  Put the modem right next to a window, practically up against the glass, and our signal increases, perhaps to a peak of two bars, occasionally three (in the best of weather conditions) – however, it is unfortunately unreliable, even peeking out at the blue sky through an open window (and our apartment is on the second of two stories).  This has been a significant frustration in the past month, especially after purchasing our brand new Xbox (see a few posts down), and dropping often and unexpectedly from our Halo 3 matches on Xbox Live.

Frustrated, I refused to accept that there was nothing we could do to cheaply and easily increase our signal strength at home, and so Rob and I tried to come up with possible solutions.  Perhaps, I suggested, we could rig some sort of antenna with a coat hanger or similar object and attach it somehow to some internal part of our modem, and run the contraption out the window.  However, this idea was quickly vetoed, due to equal parts (1) uncertainty about how exactly these electronic thingamajigs work; and (2) unwillingness to go fiddling around with something we’d probably have to pay to replace (especially if the fiddling around presented the potential to burn our apartment down or cause grievous bodily injury to ourselves in the process).  Perhaps we could buy a commercial signal booster or other such item, but if we were willing to spend money on one of those, we might as well spend it switching service providers.  Was there nothing we could do?

Then, an idea came to me in the middle of the night (as ideas are wont to do), fueled perhaps by a few fingers of Scotch and an evening of cheesy 1950s Sci-fi movies.  What if I made a deflector dish of sorts out of aluminum foil, and placed it behind the modem, facing out the window?  Could such a thing work?  I had never heard of this sort of thing being done before, but based on my rudimentary understanding of scientific principles, I figured it was worth a shot.  I resolved to try out my crazy scheme the next day.

After heading out to meet with some friends over coffee the next morning, I returned home and hopped online, finding the signal as finicky as ever.  It looked to become a dreary day, with some potentially serious weather looming on the horizon, and apparently the signal had been iffy all morning.  As I sat at my computer, testing the signal strength and testing my patience for about an hour, the best our modem was able to manage that day was a measly one bar, and even that for only a few minutes at a time, before going out again and searching for a signal.  I decided that now was the time to test my idea, and so I bounded into the kitchen seeking our handy roll of aluminum foil.  Admittedly, I felt very silly tearing off sheets of foil and shaping them ever-so-carefully around our modem, and I’m glad no one was around to see.  It felt like superstition, pseudoscience, but I felt that it had potential so I had to give it a whirl.

It keeps the gub'ment from reading my mind!

Lo and behold, as soon as I put that tinfoil dish behind our modem, the signal jumped from an unreliable one bar all the way up to FOUR BARS, higher than I think we had ever received before, and it didn’t go down all day.  Had my crazy idea really worked?  Could three cents worth of aluminum foil really give us such a drastic increase in signal strength and stability?  Our connection remained strong the rest of the day, but I was still unconvinced – it could have been a coincidence, or there could have been a hidden variable I was failing to notice.  That night, around midnight, as I was preparing for bed, I decided to carefully and delicately remove my two-sheet addition, doing so without touching the modem, and see whether its absence would affect the signal.  As soon as that foil was away from our modem, the signal strength immediately dropped down from four bars to two.  Eureka!

Since that night, I’m still working on perfecting the shape/placement of our tin foil dish for maximum effect, but I have to say I’m generally impressed with the results of my crazy experiment.  Our signal is still often at four bars, a strength we never achieved before, and although there are still occasionally days and times of weak connectivity, in general I think I can show that we do better with the foil than without.  And apparently other people have come up with similar ideas:  Science is so… fucking… cool.