Microwave Ovens and Internet Speeds.

Some microwaves are quite leaky, I have seen effective radiated power of tens of milliwatts, and also some folk try and stretch their luck with 2.4GHz WiFi. If you have a rock solid connection with 60dB of excess signal to noise ratio and  / or the door seals are in good condition, you will not see any effect.

Equally folk hanging on to near drop out levels of RF, received signals of -80dBm or less (that is 1 milliwatt divide by 10⁸), will find it falls over at every small disruption, and a microwave with imperfect door sealing could be that - some designs  are quite a wide band jammer, as simple power supplies mean they have a strong a few hundred MHz of FM sweeping in time with the mains frequency.
The maximum permitted leakage  specified in EN 60335-2-25 is 5 mW/cm² on a receive antenna at a distance of 50mm from the surface of the oven (mW/cm2 is the power present in one square centimetre measured in milliwatts).  After a few years of having the door bashed about, some do not quite meet this limit near the doors, most are much quieter round the back and sides. Generally signals expand cone like, so the no of mW/cm²  falls off with the square of distance, but then so does the signal from the router - which is why it is 10 orders of magnitude weaker at the other side of the house than near the transmitter, and of course why we use dB relative to a milliwatt, and generally the nearest few of them. If a radio signal has not doubled or halved in power for no good reason during a fixed link, it is probably not real radio.


Of course a reliable fibre or twisted pair back to the router is not affected like this.

A similar consideration applies to  ADSL which is fine in town, but becomes far more 'flakey' if you are far from the exchange and have a lot of overhead feed both picking up and radiating on medium wave,

Some microwaves are quite leaky, I have seen effective radiated power of tens of milliwatts, and also some folk try and stretch their luck with 2.4GHz WiFi. If you have a rock solid connection with 60dB of excess signal to noise ratio and  / or the door seals are in good condition, you will not see any effect.

Equally folk hanging on to near drop out levels of RF, received signals of -80dBm or less (that is 1 milliwatt divide by 10⁸), will find it falls over at every small disruption, and a microwave with imperfect door sealing could be that - some designs  are quite a wide band jammer, as simple power supplies mean they have a strong a few hundred MHz of FM sweeping in time with the mains frequency.
The maximum permitted leakage  specified in EN 60335-2-25 is 5 mW/cm² on a receive antenna at a distance of 50mm from the surface of the oven (mW/cm2 is the power present in one square centimetre measured in milliwatts).  After a few years of having the door bashed about, some do not quite meet this limit near the doors, most are much quieter round the back and sides. Generally signals expand cone like, so the no of mW/cm²  falls off with the square of distance, but then so does the signal from the router - which is why it is 10 orders of magnitude weaker at the other side of the house than near the transmitter, and of course why we use dB relative to a milliwatt, and generally the nearest few of them. If a radio signal has not doubled or halved in power for no good reason during a fixed link, it is probably not real radio.


Of course a reliable fibre or twisted pair back to the router is not affected like this.

A similar consideration applies to  ADSL which is fine in town, but becomes far more 'flakey' if you are far from the exchange and have a lot of overhead feed both picking up and radiating on medium wave,