Roughly six months into this grand work-from-home experiment, I've upgraded to fiber, filled my home with enterprise-grade networking gear including two high-end access points, and yet I'm embarrassed to admit my favorite upgrade so far is the 50-foot Ethernet cable running from my living room to my study.

Kind of anticlimactic, right?

It all started after I got sick of my cable internet connection dropping every couple of hours. Our Comcast contract was up, and it turned out cheap, gigabit fiber was available in our neighborhood.

To be clear, these outages were rarely long lived, usually lasting less than a minute. If I wasn't working from home, I probably would have just ignored the problem, cycled the router, and gone on with my day. But since #WFH was my new reality, it was out with the cable modem and hello optical network terminal. Surely gigabit would solve all my problems, right? Ha! No.

While the switch to fiber certainly helped with the outages, I was still experiencing problems with Zoom calls and the like. While calls were no longer dropping — a real quality of life improvement — calls were still degrading into a mess of pixels and robotic voices more than I would have liked. So, figuring CenturyLink's cheap wireless router was to blame, I did what any annoyed millennial would do: I threw money at the problem and hoped that'd be the end of it.

So in went an enterprise router, switch, and access point. To put it lightly, this was absolute overkill for my tiny home network. At any given time there are maybe two dozen devices connected, and most of them are smart speakers and other bandwidth-sipping IoT devices. And after about four weeks of getting everything tuned in, things were, honestly, a lot better. Though if you're thinking about doing a similar home network upgrade, I don't recommend getting a router that requires you to push configs over secure shell (SSH) and secure copy protocol (SCP). If you'd like to know more about the nightmare that was my gigabit network overhaul, I wrote a blog post all about it a few months back.

I was still getting the occasional hiccup in Zoom, but no more dropped connections. Unfortunately, by this point, I was way too far down the rabbit hole to settle for "good enough."

It was only when I was configuring the APs, and high-interference warnings began popping up, that it dawned on me. Right across the street was the elementary school. What is, I'm sure, a wonderland of learning for children, also happens to be a radio frequency (RF)  hellscape for anyone trying to get work done over WiFi.

A quick peek at MacOS's WiFi diagnostics confirmed my fears: The school was packed to the gills with dozens of access points that rendered the 2.4 GHz band practically unusable. Things seemed to be a little better on the 5 GHz band, but noise levels were fluctuating wildly from crystal clear to downright abysmal, especially on channels not compromised by aviation radars.

Thankfully, for most of my neighbors, the inverse square law was on their side. The farther electromagnetic signals — like WiFi — travel, the weaker they get. This is why the farther you get from your router, the poorer the signal gets and probably why my neighbors hadn't flooded their internet service providers with trouble tickets.

I should note that you don't have to live next to a school for RF interference to ruin your day. If you live in a densely populated apartment complex or condominium, there's a good chance your neighbors' WiFi routers are having a similar effect on your network.

RF interference typically doesn't negatively impact streaming services since they keep a few minutes in the buffer, but voice-over-IP (VoIP) and other unified-communications-as-a-service platforms, like Zoom, are far more sensitive to RF noise. Changing your router or AP to a less crowded channel or to a narrower channel width usually can help, but your options may be limited depending on your equipment or if you happen to live in a densely packed apartment where your neighbors are also working from home.

WiFi may be great for streaming Netflix or catching up on the latest episode of Lovecraft Country — no spoilers! I haven't started yet — but it can be a nightmare for things like Zoom or WebEx. So if you're in a similar boat, I recommend skipping my RF headache altogether and jacking straight into The Matrix for your third virtual event this week.