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Originally Posted by Pinecone
So what happens when you have 300 wifi devices on at once? Inside a Faraday cage? Why is "wifi" delivery worse? Does it run at higher power?
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What does it matter if they're inside a Faraday cage? Also, airplanes are definitely not Faraday cages, or you'd not be able to use your cell phone in the plane prior to takeoff or after landing.
Also, you need to understand how wifi works. Devices generally don't send out signals unless there's a wifi access point they can connect to. If there's no access point (no in-flight wifi), the devices are passive in terms of radio emissions (they'll still chew up battery looking for wifi signals if you don't put them in airplane mode, of course). Access points with SSID enabled are constantly broadcasting, but as the article said that's only an issue if the access points are misconfigured. One would expect that would not be the case, but if it is there's nothing a passenger can do about it.
When in-flight wifi is turned on and devices are accessing it, the radio emissions don't stack. That is, two devices communicating with an access point do not generate twice as powerful radio emissions as one device communicating with an access point. The problem here apparently has to do with the strength of the signals, not the number of individual signals.
You have to read more of the article than just the headline. In this case, the only known issue with wireless communications interfering with aircraft systems is out of the hands of passengers. While it's theoretically possible that a passenger could bring on a rogue device that intentionally mimics a misconfigured inflight wifi system, or a rogue passenger somehow successfully hacks into the inflight wifi and configures it to cause problems, that's highly unlikely. You can't do this on accident, and any passenger who would do this on purpose isn't going to pay attention to the "please turn off all electronics" requests.