Wifi Purge

image Although I was aware that I was being exposed to a lot of EM radiation in my home office I didn’t really give it much thought, that is until I read this article – The Gathering Brainstorm – in the Ecologist magazine.  I then did a quick count and found that I was being bombarded by:

  1. A WIFI access point less than a meter away
  2. A mobile phone 30cm away
  3. A laptop WIFI 30cm away
  4. A DECT phone 50cm away
  5. Another laptop WIFI 2M away
  6. A WIFI Access point 5M away through a wall
  7. Another DECT phone 3M away through a wall
  8. Bluetooth
  9. A wireless keyboard and mouse

I decided it was probably too much of a risk given the current poor state of research,  so I made a few changes:

  1. Switched the two laptops in the office to wired connections
  2. Disabled the WIFI in the office and now only use the one that is 5M away
  3. Set my Blackberry to autoforward calls automatically to my landline as soon as it’s plugged into power
  4. Moved the DECT phone a lot further away
  5. Switched to a wired keyboard
  6. Switched off Bluetooth,  I hardly ever use it anyway – prefer wired headsets

This list now looks a lot better:

  1. A DECT phone 1.5M away
  2. A WIFI Access point 5M away through a wall
  3. Another DECT phone 3M away through a wall
  4. Wireless mouse

Steve Richards

I'm retired from work as a business and IT strategist. now I'm travelling, hiking, cycling, swimming, reading, gardening, learning, writing this blog and generally enjoying good times with friends and family

4 Responses

  1. Chris says:

    Hi Steve,

    Good article. Good Points!

    As a user of both wired and Wireless gear, I have looked into the articles into this sort of thing, and for every article that supported Wireless there is one that is against it.

    My fear is that our children are going to pay the price for our ignorance/eagerness to take up this technolog, much like smoking was taken up by our (great) grandparents. We all know its bad for us and has become banned insome places.

    Chris

  2. Stu Downes says:

    I wonder how wimax will skew the debate?

  3. MArcel says:

    “Set my Blackberry to autoforward calls automatically to my landline as soon as it’s plugged into power”

    Can I ask how you configure this? I’d like to try this, but I think I would miss knowing (I assume the Blackberry doesn’t show this when forwarding) who is calling too much.

  4. Steve Richards says:

    You need a bit of software on your Blackberry. I use FastForward http://www.colabnet.com/index.php/home/products/fastforward/

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

%d bloggers like this: