Anti Wi-Fi Paint

By L.A, 10:10 pm Sat Oct 3 2009 - News - 4 Opinions

I know everyone always wanted to protect their Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) network at home from unauthorized access by neighbors or other network intruders.  The solution? Password protect it with WEP, or WPA.  Other than that? Is there anything that comes to your mind?  The answer is paint.  Yes the humble paint.

So you maybe asking now, how?  The idea is very simple, paint the walls using a special paint where you don’t want signal to pass through, say the outside of your house.  Special paint? Why is it special? The secret is mixing aluminum-oxide with paint.  The particles of Aluminum-oxide resonates at the same frequency as the microwave signal of your WiFi router or access point thus blocking the signal to pass through.  One drawback though, signal from outside will also not be able to penetrate your house.

The technology was developed at the University of Tokyo.  The paint can block frequencies of up to 100GHz and most WiFi technologies operates at 2.4GHz.

Will this technology be of interest to Filipinos? For me it’s not.  Why repaint and redecorate your house when you can just use a very complex password for your WiFi access point?

One engineer even says “Surely the thought of having to redecorate a building in order to provide Wi-Fi security is more costly and complex than the security functionality available in even the cheapest of Wi-Fi access points…”  I have same sentiment as him.

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