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I wonder if some kind of jammer is running in that area. Reminds me of a similar story: https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/1/5672762/man-faces-48000-fi... Weird that even a wired connection does not work. Stay curious!
My first thought as well was there could be something emitting an intense signal in the vicinity that is interfering with the connection. However, there does not seem to be anything nearby (like I said, it is on a bridge going over a lake).
> The fix was easy: upgrade our hardware. This made me smile. My brain autocompleted the fix to something like "help the neighbors trim their tree", but of course the fix is new hardware.
Well, that would have meant interacting with other people...
Let me see if I'm the first one to link to that classic story in the same series, "I cannot send email further than 500 miles" http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html Or the Magic/More Magic switch http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html It's fun when physical reality meets the abstract models that we have built in our heads of these machines.
I had a customer who used a line of sight system for extending their network across part of a city. I had a shortcut on my desktop with the weather for that town ready when they would inevitably call and blame our unrelated equipment for some problem.
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I think it’s a fair comment. A lot of readers on HN are adept debuggers, and will start to analyze everything from the first paragraph. By burying the lede like that, it feels like wasted time, to have begun debugging before the (incredibly important) part about the unusual setup was revealed. Seems almost implausible that the protagonist, with his technical knowhow, did not think of this earlier.. Anyway, it’s a mat…
But I don't know - writing is something that comes in a flow. This wasn't some deliberate clickbaity thing by the author, they just wrote it in a way that that made sense to them.
It also seems that the author themselves did not consider the setup at first, which happens, as sometimes we have tunnel vision.
You may criticize his abilities I guess, although overall it just felt like an account of things as they happened to the author, not considering how someone might be trying to guess things once they publish it.
So yeah, I don't know, I just feel like there's too much negativity sometimes. But maybe I overreacted.
I have a hard time believing this. Wifi can go through multiple walls. And if these were directional P2P links, they can easily go through and even around trees, I've deployed them in the past and they don't need perfect line of sight. Granted the equipment could have been cheap, but this sounds questionable. He's asserting that the a few leaves at the top of a tree were blocking it when it wasn't raining? Idk.
I'm the author. Among other things, it's a distance problem -- WiFi can go through walls when the router is right there. But distance attenuates the signal as distance squared, and in this case we're talking about hundred+ yards/meters instead of just a couple.
Sure but didn't you say you were using directional antennas?
The unusual internet setup is pretty important information to bury a few paragraphs in. Once that was explained it seemed like they should have started by checking nothing was blocking the antenna before tediously running around plugging the laptop into things and following cables and checking power supplies on the networking equipment? Hindsight is 20/20 but I correctly guessed the ending as soon as that information…
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If you're e.g. running a piece of software with a crazy custom plugin that overhauls major functionality and then an update to the base software breaks everything, it shouldn't be TOO much of a mystery on where to start looking. When you add weird custom parts to a system, it tends to be a point of failure.
Perhaps the author just didn't remember that they had a custom setup like that, but it wasn't framed in the article like "suddenly I remembered...", it was just stated as a given. And the fact that it was giving them particularly high speed home internet access for the time, it'd be a kind hard thing to forget?
Let me see if I'm the first one to link to that classic story in the same series, "I cannot send email further than 500 miles" http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html Or the Magic/More Magic switch http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html It's fun when physical reality meets the abstract models that we have built in our heads of these machines.
Eventually I realized that the sensor is an optical beam, and the receiver happened to be in direct sunlight coming in through a window! So it was continuously receiving infrared and would never report the beam being blocked by a pinball. Sure enough, it started working again once the sun angle changed by a few more degrees.
> One such piece of magic new to 802.11n Wi-Fi is called "beamfoming"
That's not quite true. 802.1ln has MIMO (Multiple-Input Multiple-Output) processing, with "multiple" referring to the number of receiver and transmitter antennas. Beamforming is a special case of MIMO, and MIMO is a generalisation of beamforming.
In a "Line-of-Sight" channel with no reflectors, MIMO converges to a beamforming solution. Capacity is then limited by the ability for the rx/tx array to resolve each antenna in the tx/rz array: the diffraction limit.
In a "rich" channel, with reflectors, MIMO converges to a more complex solution, which takes advantage of the angular separation of the reflectors to resolve the individual rx/tx antennas, even if they are too close to each other to resolve with beamforming. Yes, counterintuitively MIMO capacity goes up as the channel become more complex/rich and less line-of-sight, whereas with just beamforming the capacity would typically go down.
You can sort of think of MIMO as being beamforming where beams are bouncing off widely spaced reflectors, but even that doesn't do it justice. In reality, each "beam" is replaced with complex wavefront ("mode") which is matched to the environment and each mode is orthogonal to the other.
While we're on the subject: I still can't solve this and thought you'd either laugh or you are the only people who know what I'm going through :) I have some fancy Asus Mesh wifi routers at home. I sit next to the cable modem and one mesh endpoint. My wife sits upstairs. there's an upstairs mesh endpoint but I think neither of us are usually connected to it (mostly serves to extend our connection to go to yard). But…