Protect Your WiFi Signal With Paint

A colleague of mine moved to a new house over the holidays. For first two weeks in her new home, she was miserable as miserable can be. Why? Because her ISP took forever to provide her service. Imagine her delight when, one morning, she turned her laptop on and found that she was getting a WiFi signal that was unsecured – open for anyone to use. That was, perhaps, her best Christmas gift ever!

Amusing as that anecdote may be, it is not a laughing matter. Walk around the city – whether you are talking about residential areas or commercial areas – and you will most likely detect WiFi signals left and right. While some of them may be secure, many of them can be accessed pretty easily. And if you are even slightly paranoid about who makes use of your bandwidth, then you can understand how serious this issue can be.

Enter the paint that can block WiFi signals.

No it is not something out of a futuristic movie – there really is paint that you can use to protect your WiFi signal from those with malicious intent, or even those who just want to use your WiFi for free. Researchers from the University of Tokyo have come up with a paint containing aluminum-iron oxide. This compound blocks frequencies up to 182GHz, definitely including WiFi signals. Currently, there are other paints available that block lower frequencies not including WiFi signals.

With this new development, you can merely paint the walls of your house or office to further contain WiFi signals. The best thing about it? It’s fairly cheap at about £10 per kilogram.