Are wireless routers a health hazards?

I have one PC and 2 laptops all in my house. My PC is wired directly to the wireless router under the desk while the other 2 laptops are connected to it within the range. Recently, I've heard that wireless signals emitted may cause potential health risk and I'm now worried of whether it is appropriate to have a wireless router at home. Should I be worried at all? Where should I place my wireless router for this safety concern?

Thanks.

 

Well, if this forum is any indication, constant frustration over getting your wireless to work is known to cause premature graying.....

On a more serious note....

wireless networking operates on the same microsowave band as a typical microwave oven, but while a microwave oven runs on 1000 watts, a router will typically run on 100mw, or 1/10,000 of the power.

So, a microwave is more dangerous than a router (though a microwave is shielded, you probably get more leakage from it than an unshielded router).

That said, yes, there is something to be concerned about. The increased health risk is greater than zero, but how high it is difficult to say. Studies are inconclusive.

There are far more studies on Cellphones and even those are inconclusive

 

Gerryf19 is correct. If you are worried you can simply shut it off at night when not using it at least then it will half the amount of time you are subjected to any harmful microwaves. Also it will save you a couple of $ on energy bill

 

lol at least there will be a few other billion people dying w/ you from wifi sickness...

 

With all due respect, if wifi radio-frequency emissions* were in any way dangerous to you or anyone else, it wouldn't matter, because we would all be dead anyways from exposure to RF emissions from FM radio and television stations, which emit many, many orders of magnitude more RF emissions than all of the wifi transmitters in the world are capable of.

More specifically, as stated in a WHO paper on the health risks of wifi RF emissions:

See World Health Organization, Electromagnetic fields and public health: Base stations and wireless technologies, Fact sheet N°304 (May 2006).

The plain fact of the matter is, the health risk from exposure to wifi RF emissions - aka wifi "radiation" - is asymptotically close to zero, or 1/ . Anyone who tells you otherwise, has ulterior political motives in mind.


* N.B. I choose the term radio-frequency emissions, or RF emissions, over the general term "radiation" because that term connotes ionizing radiation, such as gamma rays, which are much more destructive - RF emissions are not ionizing radiation and therefore cannot affect you in the same way that, say, radiation from Uranium will affect you.

 

I know a lot of people who have gotten fat and lazy after installing wireless working at home but I'm not sure what the relationship might be........

 

I've been searching through the net about this issues and all those sites did not give me a convincing facts but unconfirmed studies. Silly me for left out WHO fact sheets. There are even people oppose the set up of full WIFI coverage here in my state and raised health concerns leading to public fear on "scary" WIFI. Well, maybe u're right Shyster1, it's all political. Lol

 

You know it could work the otherway, it might give you superpowers like accessing data thru air?

 

What sort of "studies" would satisfy you? There have been a raft of studies on cell-phone RF emissions, none of which has demonstrated any safety hazards - given that cell-phone RF emissions are substantially stronger than wifi RF emissions, it would stand to reason that the cell-phone studies would, ipso facto, demonstrate that there were no issues regarding wifi.

As for political? It's always political, just like the intellectual midgets who continue to insist, all demonstrated fact to the contrary, that vaccinations cause autism. Better yet, it is precisely the same as the dimwits who come out of the woodwork each year and try to convince state textbook committees to buy textbooks that claim creationism is "fact" and evolution "fantasy" - that is precisely what these wifi-deniers are doing.

 

Just keep your RED TAPE handy, eg. reference to the film PULSE.

 

Here's a study: http://www.springerlink.com/content/hr8yqqpdf6cgbxww/

Key quote: "Due to these limitations and the inconsistencies of the results it has to be concluded that the studies give no evidence of high frequency emissions causing cancer."

Remember, ALL radiation follows the inverse-square law, so the miniscule amount of power that the wireless device is rated at is even less unless you stick it in your ear. For example:
A typical card today transmits at 50mW (that's milli-Watts, not mega). So at the antenna, you get 50mW of radiation exposure. At 1m away you only get 3.97mW/m^2. At 2m, it's down to 0.99mW. And so on. And it's all non-ionizing radiation, so it's also not known by any mechanism to cause cancer in the first place. Space radio emissions from the sun hit you with more power than that daily.

 

Here ya go! Me, well, call me old school, but I still prefer the foil: