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Beacons of hopelessness

Editor: The school year has started and, with that, students, teachers and administrative staff will be exposed to Wi-Fi.

Editor:

The school year has started up in school districts in the Lower Mainland and, with that, students, teachers and administrative staff will be exposed to Wi-Fi and the perpetually pulsing beacon signal that is present in every single Wi-Fi router or access point on the planet.

The beacon allows Wi-Fi networks to be visible in a list so that wireless devices can connect to them. The latest “wireless N” access-point transmitters being installed in classrooms have a range of 800 to 1,000 feet.

There is one very shocking fact about Wi-Fi that 99.9 per cent of parents and the public at large are woefully unaware of: Meters that were developed to convert the beacon signal into sound actually turn the invisible waves into audible sound so you can hear the “beats” and “bursts” of microwave radiation.

The default “beacon interval” setting for Wi-Fi routers and access points is 100 milliseconds – that’s a rate of 10 pulses per second.

If you do the math: 10 bursts per second equals 600 bursts per minute equals 36,000 bursts per hour equals 864,000 bursts of microwave radiation a 24-hour day.

Multiply this in schools and office/apartment buildings by the number of individual routers or access points – the networks that show up in the “available Wi-Fi network list” on phones, iPads and computers.

Ten available Wi-Fi networks showing up on a device – not uncommon in any of these situations – creates: 8,640,000 bursts in a 24-hour period. This is in addition to the radiation coming off the devices’ two-way transmitters to connect to the network.

I highly doubt that school district trustees and administrators around the world are aware of this. I also sincerely doubt that the human body was designed to withstand this.

I say, with much humility and concern, watch for the “official” health agencies – Health Canada, the FDA and the World Health Organization – to backtrack and do an “oops, we goofed, our bad, we’re sorry, this is a threat to human health,” a la asbestos, tobacco, etc., in the next two to five years.

Carl Katz, Surrey