Wi-Fi vs. Bluetooth
My question relates to Wi-Fi Vs. Bluetooth: A microwave oven when it ages puts out a lot of power, up to 100 Watts across the spectrum. When a microwave oven is operated in close proximity to a Bluetooth wireless device, it blows the Bluetooth signal out of the water. Will the same thing not happen with Wi-Fi signals, being blown out of the water, that is?

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Like Bluetooth, 802.11b and 802.11g operate in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. That band is vulnerable to interference from microwave ovens, which can emit a broad swath of waves centered around 2.45 GHz. Whether this proves to be disruptive or not depends on how leaky the microwave oven is, what channel the Wi-Fi LAN is using, how far the Wi-Fi stations and access point are from the microwave oven, etc. When microwave interference proves to be an insurmountable problem, Wi-Fi users can switch to 802.11a, which operates in the 5 GHz UNII band and thus is unaffected by microwave ovens (or Bluetooth, for that matter).

 

This was first published in June 2003