How do Wi-Fi Signals travel through walls and obstacles?
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Radio waves (which wifi is made of) can penetrate solid objects up to a certain thickness. This is simply a physical property of the relatively low frequency and long wavelength of wifi signals. It isn’t much different than light in principle, which passes through clear glass easily.
It’s radiation. “Electromagnetic radiation” includes everything from radio, infrared (heat), light, xrays, cosmic rays. Just all of it.
Everything is various levels of transparent or opaque to all the different frequencies of radiation. Just like we have glass which light passes right through, most walls are mostly transparent to wifi signals.
Most things are mostly transparent to xrays, they wiggle so fast that they can slip through. It’s literally a matter of how dense the matter is, so the gaps between are so small, the wavelength doesn’t fit through.
Walls are wood, drywall, plaster, paint, brick, concrete, wire-mesh. Wood and drywall are mostly transparent to wifi. Lathe and plaster houses have wire-mesh holding the plaster in place and that metal wire (and the size of the holes) is opaque to wifi and it’s a real bear for devices. They need repeaters in different rooms.
To add onto the other answers, its The exact same way visible light travels through glass! Visible light, wifi, radio etc are all just photons with varying amount of energy, and depending on the energy they have they will pass through materials differently.
WiFi signal is basically like light. Both light and WiFi signal are in the family of electromagnetic radiation and the same rules apply to them.
So just as light can travel through some objects (like, glass), there are materials and objects that are transparent for WiFi signal.
But just like a very very thick glass that’s hardly transparent anymore for light, a very thick wall is hardly transparent for WiFi signal.
So basically you can imagine a WiFi router as a lamp and the walls made of glass.
They dont really do it that well… they mostly bounce around and fill the space.
heres a propagation gif of wifi through a house https://www.reddit.com/r/gifs/comments/4lehx5/how_wifi_waves_propagate_in_a_building/
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