Strange as it may seem, the answer is yes. Here’s what happened:
We had spent several days at the company dealing with WiFi outages, which were causing a fair bit of chaos in the warehouse, and we couldn’t pin down the reason: maybe the tablets and PDAs they use didn’t have a powerful enough receiver chip, maybe the access point was badly positioned and didn’t provide enough coverage, maybe that access point wasn’t powerful enough for all the devices… when suddenly, the systems manager came out with a phrase that turned out to be the key:
"The thing is, I can’t even eat in peace for one day…"
And lo and behold, by putting two and two together, the mystery was uncovered (no pun intended), and the thing is that microwaves operate on the 2.4 GHz frequency, the same one used by most WiFi devices for some time now (although more and more use the less saturated 5 GHz frequency), and our access point was right above the dining room. It only took running one of the microwaves for two minutes for all the PDAs to start dropping out.
Once the mystery was solved, we need to clear things up a little, since many of us have WiFi and microwaves at home without any trouble. This is possible because these appliances have a metal mesh called a “Faraday cage” surrounding them which, in theory, prevents these interference-causing waves from escaping. Apparently ours must not have passed their last inspection, so what happened happened.
If the topic has interested you and you want to know a little more, here’s a link where they even suggest an experiment we can try at home, with no risk, okay?
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