Felix Balderas 
EDINBURG – With the holiday season coming up, houses across the nation are decorating their homes with festive decorations and holiday lights around their Christmas trees and homes. Some families may be wondering if their holiday lights are influencing their Wi-Fi connectivity.
Heinrich Foltz, an electrical engineering professor at UTRGV explained Wi-Fi is at a power level fixed by regulation, it can’t go over certain maximum power and many factors can contribute to Wi-Fi connectivity issues.
Foltz elaborated on three main factors that contribute to path loss; antennas, obstructions between the router and devices like walls or metal structures, and distance which poses the most significant issues with weak signal transmission.
“Well-designed Christmas lights should emit nothing, in fact, according to regulations, there are limits about how much they are allowed to emit and it’s essentially nothing. Does every light meet the regulations? No. […] what I can tell you is if they are static lights that don’t flash or blink, the emission from them is going to be very minimal. The wires might scatter your waves a little bit, even if they are flashing, the interference is typically going to be in the kilohertz or lone megahertz range.” said Foltz.
According to PBS, visible light from your holiday decor isn’t messing with your Wi-Fi because the two don’t work on the same frequency. The primary culprit is the electromagnetic radiation from the wires or LED electronics, which can shed interference in the range of radio and Wi-Fi frequencies.
Foltz added that Wi-Fi emits 2.4 or 5.6 GHz electromagnetic waves which are not considered vital, and the wavelength is between six to twelve centimeters. Holiday lights shouldn’t be radiating much at all, and to the extent they do, it shouldn’t be much at all.
“If you really want to interfere with the signal, you need to literally drape it in lights so that it’s completely covered with lights, like every inch or two, then you would start to see some blockage, hanging a string long your gutter Is not going to do much,” said Foltz.
For anyone who may be experiencing Wi-Fi connectivity issues, the problem is unlikely to have much to do with holiday lights and more to do with a weak Wi-Fi connection, physical obstacles, distance, and the number of devices using the Wi-Fi according to Foltz.
