Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

blog.akamai-mpulse.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 115 posts

Re: Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

#81

Post by cft »

cesarb wrote: post #80
cft wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cause is the frequency drop that was not compensated by the inertia of rotating turbines due to increasing use of photovoltaics. See https://x.com/shellenberger/status/1916893181876326868?t=32a... A high level engineer in a Spanish generation plant confirmed this to me.

> The cause is the frequency drop that was not compensated by the inertia of rotating turbines due to increasing use of photovoltaics. But what caused the frequency drop? Large-scale grids are designed and operated in such a manner that any single fault, even one which causes a frequency drop (like a generator or a power line getting disconnected), will not cause a blackout. Which means: if there isn't enough inertia…

According to my friend, the freq drop was caused by a sudden large supply surplus over the instantaneous demand. Nuclear plants were offline and there was nothing to absorb the freq drop at that moment.

Re: Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

#82

Post by ergl »

snkzxbs wrote: post #63
Funes- wrote: post #52

>Germans take a 1 hour lunch from 12-1pm. Spaniards have a later lunch, starting around 1pm, and going on until 4 or 5pm. This could possibly be due to the tradition of afternoon siesta. This is not only untrue, but I would argue it also borders on being defamatory, consciously or not. Lunch breaks are typically one to two hours long in Spain, not three to four hours long--that's ridiculous . What the author is descr…

You are missing the fact that a lot of people in Spain, maybe the majority, do what’s called a “jornada partida”, which means that businesses close at around 1-2 pm and then reopen at around 5-6 pm. During that time people generally have lunch and maybe sleep. Especially during the hotter months, the streets are practically empty.

Jornada partida doesn't tend to apply to office workers and white collar work in general. It's common to see it in small shops, but it's in steep decline even in those areas.

Re: Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

#83

Post by cesarb »

blahaj wrote: post #74
rightbyte wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I only managed to load news pages, national or foreign, a few times during the hours of outage I think this is a problem with https. I remember intermittent connectivity as way better before Google forced the issue. And yes I like https. But it comes with drawbacks. E.g. no isp caching.

I don't think ISP caching would be a thing without https. It would bring a lot of additional complexity and resource requirements for them. I can hardly imagine that being worth it to save some bandwidth. Maybe it made sense in a world where bandwidth was very limited. Also I am very happy that it is not a thing and that ISPs cannot do that. When I go to a website I want to get the website from the webserver exactly…

> I don't think ISP caching would be a thing without https. It would bring a lot of additional complexity and resource requirements for them. I can hardly imagine that being worth it to save some bandwidth. Maybe it made sense in a world where bandwidth was very limited.

Transparent squid proxies were common back when most sites were on http. They let ISPs reduce the use of their limited upstream bandwidth, while also making sites load faster. The complexity and resource requirements were modest: install squid on a server, and configure the router to redirect (masquerade) all outgoing TCP port 80 connections to the port configured for squid on that server.

Re: Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

#84

Post by cesarb »

cft wrote: post #81
cesarb wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The cause is the frequency drop that was not compensated by the inertia of rotating turbines due to increasing use of photovoltaics. But what caused the frequency drop? Large-scale grids are designed and operated in such a manner that any single fault, even one which causes a frequency drop (like a generator or a power line getting disconnected), will not cause a blackout. Which means: if there isn't enough inertia…

According to my friend, the freq drop was caused by a sudden large supply surplus over the instantaneous demand. Nuclear plants were offline and there was nothing to absorb the freq drop at that moment.

> According to my friend, the freq drop was caused by a sudden large supply surplus over the instantaneous demand.

Wouldn't a supply surplus cause a frequency increase, not a frequency drop?

Re: Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

#85

Post by cft »

cesarb wrote: post #84
cft wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to my friend, the freq drop was caused by a sudden large supply surplus over the instantaneous demand. Nuclear plants were offline and there was nothing to absorb the freq drop at that moment.

> According to my friend, the freq drop was caused by a sudden large supply surplus over the instantaneous demand. Wouldn't a supply surplus cause a frequency increase , not a frequency drop?

In the case of the rotating generators, yes. In the case of the solar panels, I do not know: I guess it depends on the inverters characterists? Spanish is not my native language, so I may have mixed it up when talking to him.

Re: Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

#86

Post by Symbiote »

Funes- wrote: post #52

>Germans take a 1 hour lunch from 12-1pm. Spaniards have a later lunch, starting around 1pm, and going on until 4 or 5pm. This could possibly be due to the tradition of afternoon siesta. This is not only untrue, but I would argue it also borders on being defamatory, consciously or not. Lunch breaks are typically one to two hours long in Spain, not three to four hours long--that's ridiculous . What the author is descr…

Also, Germany is 13° east of Spain. That's almost 1 hour worth, 1 hour would be 15°.

There's a misconception that Spanish people are 'lazy' for their late lunches, but they're eating lunch at roughly the same local solar time.

Re: Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

#87

Post by Symbiote »

sillyfluke wrote: post #51
makeitdouble wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hazing against the cash-first minority That's...a pretty strong opinion. Otherwise cash will still have it's issue during a blackout. For instance I'm not sure most shops would operate their POS during a blackout or without any connectivity, at least if there is any hope of resuming normal operations within days, it would screw the ledgers. ATMs of course are dead. Vending machines are also probably not ready for t…

>That's...a pretty strong opinion. I'll go out on a limb and say it's only a strong opinion for anyone who isn't familiar with trying to use cash exclusively for all physical transcations under 1000 dollars in their day-to-day lives. In London, they have tube stations with a single coffee stand on the platform that's card-only. It's a fucking outrage in my humble opinion. and just another form of debanking, pure and…

Denmark is often cited as an example of a society that's advanced for electronic payments, and it is — but there's a law here that means, in most circumstances, a business must accept cash.

The official advice was changed from "keep some cash for emergencies" to "keep some cash in small banknotes for emergencies" to "pay in cash at least sometimes, to keep the systems that deal with it functioning".

Re: Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

#88

Post by gus_massa »

codetrotter wrote: post #2

> some information services were still able to stay online and available I’m in Valencia, Spain. The mobile internet connectivity here during the power outage was very unstable. Cellular phone signal strength was also very very low for the majority of the time. Even sending SMS or WhatsApp messages would not work most of the day, because of just how unusable mobile connection was for me and my girlfriend and our fami…

> And I only managed to load news pages,

Did you try with HN? I remember a long time ago I was in a hotel with bad connectivity, and one of the few sites that loaded was HN (no images, almost no JS, ...). I was able to read the comments, but it was difficult to read most of the articles.

Re: Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

#89

Post by codetrotter »

MisterTea wrote: post #78
codetrotter wrote: post #2

> some information services were still able to stay online and available I’m in Valencia, Spain. The mobile internet connectivity here during the power outage was very unstable. Cellular phone signal strength was also very very low for the majority of the time. Even sending SMS or WhatsApp messages would not work most of the day, because of just how unusable mobile connection was for me and my girlfriend and our fami…

> - What’s going on? How bad is it? How long is it going to last? Very unstable mobile internet as mentioned. Silly question but do you have AM or FM radio? When the lights went out in the northeast blackout of 2003 we turned to our cars to put on AM radio. Even after Hurricane Sandy my mother was without power for 3 weeks and she was running a battery powered radio. I shudder to think of a future where moving inform…

It’s a very valid question.

I don’t have one currently. But I did hear later that others were using radio to get news.

Thank you for bringing it up again. I’m gonna buy a small battery powered radio :)

Re: Internet usage pattern during power outage in Spain and Portugal

#90

Post by tiagod »

amelius wrote: post #20
briandear wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in Barcelona (Sabadell specifically,) and the cellular networks were down. Luckily I have a generator and Starlink.

Curious if anyone was able to use their Meshtastic radio to contact anyone. https://meshtastic.org/

I live close to Lisbon (in the South margin of the Tagus river) and I can say Meshtastic was very active throughout the outage.

I received news of power coming back in the first few towns through it, before FM radio.

I needed to get closer to the river to get reliable contacts, but I've now ordered a nice antenna and a solar kit to mount a repeater in a mast on my roof so I can cover the center of my town more reliably.

Post reply on HN