electromagnetism - Why does my cell phone still work inside a metal box?

I just did the following experiment:

Using a metal Whitman's chocolate box, I placed my phone it it, closed the lid then called it from another phone. To my surprise, it rang.

The normal parameters of a faraday cage is any gaps have to be small compared to the wavelength of the radiation. The edges of the box overlap by about 1 cm, and the gap is a fraction of a mm.

Phones operate at 1-2 GHz.  Skin depth for 1 GHz is about 2 microns Wavelength of 1 GHz is about 8 inches.

Even if it's 30 ga metal that's still 12 thou or about 300 microns.  Now it's steel, not copper, but steel isn't THAT much worse a conductor.

I don't understand what is going on.

Edit: More experiments:

I have phoning over wifi enabled, and I'm sitting 20 feet from the access point. Disabling the wifi on the phone and using the 2 bar local cell signal, no calls.

Re-enable wi-fi and I can reach the phone in the box intermittently. I can ping the phone from my local network which makes for faster tests. Curiously, the phone doesn't respond to pings when it's asleep.

My current working hypothesis is that the electrical connection between the box and the lid isn't reliable.

The box is laquered with red and gold Christmas colours which may be acting as an insulator.

After opening and closing the box several times, while running a ping to the device over my local I get erratic results. Sometimes closing the box gets me 'request timed out.' sometimes not.

Wrapping it with alumininum foil loosely gives more odd results.

At one point I had it loose enough that I could see the phone -- gap of maybe 1 cm, and got device unreachable, and didn't become reachable until it was open to about 2 inches. I suspect that my AP has some kind of adaptive power setting.

Right now it's sitting in it's metal box and I'll get a series of 20 unreachables, 4 pings with variable times, more timeouts.

Answer

The normal parameters of a faraday cage is any gaps have to be small compared to the wavelength of the radiation. The edges of the box overlap by about 1 cm, and the gap is a fraction of a mm.

The important dimension is the longest dimension of the gap. So if you have a seam 0.01 mm wide, but 10 cm long, it's the 10 cm dimension that matters when deciding if the gap is "small" compared to the wavelength.

So if the seal between the lid and the body of your candy box goes all the way around the box, as they typically do, then the critical dimension is the length of the box.

It's also possible the box parts have some coating (paint or a plastic film) that prevents the two metal part making a metal-to-metal contact anywhere in the seam.

The fact that the two parts overlap by 1 cm does mitigate this somewhat, so you would expect some blocking from this arrangement.

The point made by Jon Custer in comments about the high resistivity of the carbon steel used in this kind of box is also likely relevant.