Will a phone or other wireless device increase its EMF output level if it receives a weaker signal from the Eco router, so that there is an unintended increase in radiation? Similar to how a mobile phone transmits at higher power when the range is poor? In other words, don’t the receiving devices have to ‘work harder’ to maintain the connection, potentially increasing EMFs locally?

Reducing the router’s transmit power does not necessarily cause client devices to increase their WiFi transmit power.

In fact, the high EMFs from a smartphone when using WiFi are problematic in their own right.

The many measurements we have made of WiFi emissions from phones and other WiFi-enabled devices like laptops, show that in many cases the client devices transmit at near maximum or unnecessarily high WiFi power continuously. Why doesn’t the phone reduce its WiFi power when it has a good signal, as it does with 4G/5G connections? It seems that there unfortunately still no effective WiFi power control mechanism that just works in all situations. We hope that it will happen in the future. Such a functioning power control would be much better, not just for EMFs but also for battery life.

In practice, robust, universal, cross-device power control that minimizes EMF exposure across all devices and scenarios has not been universally implemented or adopted in consumer devices. Market activity varies by device and firmware (source: general standard summaries and industry commentary).

There are a number of attempts. There is the 802.11h 5 GHz protocol, which only works in a few optimised situations. For Wi-Fi 6, there are a number of new protocols. However, we haven’t seen much of a difference when actually measuring the EMFs that phones and other WiFi devices emit. We see very often that phones and other wireless devices still transmit at maximum WiFi power regardless of the signal strength received from the router. Our measurements actually show that WiFi is the strongest source of electrosmog in modern smartphones.

You can verify this yourself by checking the EMF emissions of a modern smartphone or other WiFi device with an RF meter. When measuring, make sure to keep the following things constant:

  • orientation of the meter with regard to the phone,
  • proximity of the meter to the phone
  • transmitted data rate,
  • WiFi network the phone is connected to.

For some devices with WiFi, especially Windows laptops with an Intel WiFi adapter, it is possible to reduce the transmission power setting in Device Manager, but this is a fixed setting, independent of the router power.