  A realistic performance assessment of any wireless technology requires the
use of a channel model that reflects its main characteristics. The independent
and identically distributed Rayleigh fading channel model has been (and still
is) the basis of most theoretical research on multiple antenna technologies in
scattering environments. This letter shows that such a model is not physically
appearing when using a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) with
rectangular geometry and provides an alternative physically feasible Rayleigh
fading model that can be used as a baseline when evaluating RIS-aided
communications. The model is used to revisit the basic RIS properties, e.g.,
the rank of spatial correlation matrices and channel hardening.
