Say, some alien just wanted to mess with us, but doesn’t invade, or even care enough to want to kill us, but seeing how everyone is on their phone all the time, they decided to just jam all our radios to watch us suffer. Their transmitting power they use is so powerful, its jamming signals are 1000 times stronger than the strongest radios we have, so there’s no way we can overpower the jamming.
What does the immediate aftermath look like?
What does it look like in the long term?
(Please don’t say “kill the aliens” they have tech so advanced, its impossible to do it)
Tell that to my microwave and WiFi router.
Wi-Fi is interesting. It’s designed for maximum bandwidth at low power levels. It also has a carrier sense system to prevent interference with other unknown devices on the unlicensed spectrum. Most things are sacrificed for that bandwidth, such as exploiting multipath and spatial propagation differences to squeeze out every last drop of data. Orthogonal carriers are spaced very close together maximize the available spectrum.
Still in this case, Wi-Fi operates at other frequencies that do not get microwave interference, and wireless network might explicitly be trying not to interfere with the microwave because it could be a device trying to share the unlicensed spectrum. The other Wi-Fi frequencies don’t go very far and aren’t good at penetrating walls, so the amount of power that an alien spaceship would have to use to block these signals categorically is crazy high. at some point you don’t have a jammer but a giant space death ray.
I’m not saying they couldn’t degrade it, but jamming them all? That sounds like a very challenging ask. Your microwave shares your living space. Meanwhile your wireless router politely avoids speaking when the microwave appears to be talking.