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The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

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Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#221

Post by devilbunny »

cdme wrote: post #31

I once had a Time Warner tech blame the moisture content of the air for impacting the copper cabling to explain outages at our apartment. This both makes more sense and, I suppose, is more interesting.

My parents’ house was connected to old copper phone lines from ca. 1940, and by the 1980s rain intrusion from long or heavy storms would cause massive static on the line (made worse when squirrels ran on the line). This was disastrous when I got my first modem ca 1986. Just unusable until it dried out.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#222

Post by nomel »

miki123211 wrote: post #185
jordigh wrote: post #15

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.

There was a site with stories like these somewhere, I sadly can't remember the URL any more. I think the one that stuck out to me was the Soviet mainframe computer that would get weird bit flips almost every day, always at the exact same time. Somebody compared what was different about the days it didn't get bit flips on, it turns out those were the days on which a particular train didn't run, the computer was very c…

Perhaps thedailywtf.com?

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#224

Post by Gazoche »

rvba wrote: post #184
thekevan wrote: post #176

This is a bit ridiculous. How can you know that you have a ling of sight element to you network and not check that as the very first thing when you hear about rain effecting the wifi?

It sounds fake, especially as the solution would be to get the original equipment higher, instead of buying new equipment? Also why not lay a cable.

> Also why not lay a cable.

According to the stories the two bridge endpoints were in different buildings a few blocks apart. You can't just lay a cable in the middle of a public street.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#225

Post by wildylion »

I also had another story: my friends asked me to troubleshoot their DSL connection. It dropped out sometime after the sun set and came back in the morning.

Sure enough, this turned out to be RFI from newly installed solar invertors, creeping down the shield of an unused CB radio coax that ran parallel to the phone wiring.

Grr, I hate DSL...

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#226

Post by justsomehnguy »

nunesvn wrote: post #219

I don't know if this is fake, but it could be true. I had a similar situation working for a WISP around 2010. Every night, for about 10 minutes, the connections from our HQ to a relay tower became flaky. At the time we were using two Mikrotik 5GHz cards and some large antennas. You could sit in front your computer and wait, a few minutes after the sunset, for the monitoring alerts start arriving. After a week trying…

> And for some reason

The ballast and the bulb itself are quite noisy in RF and then they are heating up they even more noisier.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#228

Post by srvmshr »

askvictor wrote: post #227

When it's extremely windy, our office Internet or Wifi speed slows down. Haven't worked out why yet. We have fibre to the building, so it's unlikely the uplink. But you never know.

It may not be the Wifi but something more upstream. If ISPs interlinks have microwave towers, then the physical swaying would have some effect on channel interference. I don't quite understand how (because the general direction remains the same over large distance) - but I have observed this to happen.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#229

Post by Dylan16807 »

obi1kenobi wrote: post #203
Dylan16807 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Won't 20dB at each end do the job? You can get 16-17dB antennas for $35 these days. And a wire parabolic dish promising 23dB for $200. 7-10dB matches the antennas I personally use, but those antennas are smaller than my phone. You can get a lot more out of a three foot spike or a two foot dish. (I'm assuming 2.4GHz and hoping they're not lying about the gain.)

Right. This is a multiple timelines problem. This story happened a bit over 10 years ago at this point. At the time of the story, the Wi-Fi bridge was already almost 10 years old -- we'd had the same equipment since I first remember getting internet at home. That means the antennas at the start of the story were mid-2000s mid-tier consumer level equipment. I don't think a 16-17dB antenna would have been $35 at the ti…

I'm not trying to critique the solution, I just think the decibel issue isn't so dire and other factors were more important. Which is supported by the way the problem was fixed.

As far as what was available at the time, I can't think of a super easy way to check that far back, but I will note that the 17dB stick antennas on Amazon have been available at the same price or cheaper for about 10 years.

Re: The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining

#230

Post by JamisonM »

hbn wrote: post #81

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…

As soon as he described the physical setup I was screaming "Tree!" internally.
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