alt Hacker NewsThe WiFi only works when it's raining (2024)
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Oh, wow. This sort of happened in my life!
My grandmother's house is adjacent my parents' w/ 200 ft. between and line of sight. Back in 2013, when my grandmother moved into the then-new house, I setup a point-to-point wifi bridge between them to share my parents' Internet connection and give me easy remote support access to grandma.
Summer of 2023 visiting relatives complained the Internet service in grandma's house was slow and unreliable. There were repeated suggestions made by helpful relatives for purchasing a new WiFi router for her house, getting independent Internet service, etc.
Grandma was happy with it, and the relatives went home, so I put off looking at it. When I did finally look at it, months later (when I went over for Thanksgiving) everything seemed fine.
When the relatives came to visit in summer 2024 they complained again. I looked at it immediately and found massive packet loss on both ends.
The ornamental trees planted along the driveway between the houses were the culprit. With the leaves off (say, at Thanksgiving time) it was fine. When the relatives came to visit in the summer the trees were in full leaf and acting as very good attenuators.
The trees were newly planted when grandma moved in. I didn't even think about them getting bigger and fuller when I set up the link. They filled out in the 10 years intervening, though. (Chalk it up to me still being relatively young and not thinking about installations on 10+ year timescales when I put it up.)
Fortunately there's a room in her house with line of sight to my parents' house unobscured by trees. It meant putting the radio outside a bedroom window instead of the attic (where I'd originally stashed it), but it solved the problem and ended complaints from relatives.
My only unsolved networking mystery was that my computer would experience high packet loss when a Roku in the other room was streaming Netflix.
My PC and the roku device were both wired to two different ports on a router (iirc an Edgerouter X running openwrt at the time). This didn't repro when the roku streamed other services (hulu/youtube tested), only netflix. This also didn't repro if the roku was connected over wireless (connecting to an AP wired to a different port). Just opening netflix also didn't repro, the roku had to be actively streaming a netflix video.
I never ended up solving it, I just worked around it by making the roku connect over wireless.
It did take me forever to figure out the problem though. For a long time I'd be in one room getting frustrated with my computer while someone was innocently watching netflix in the other room.
Wifi routers are little magic devices that work only when they want. I talked before here, but I had a Dell Vostro notebook that everytime it connected with my router using windows it would just kill the entire home wifi. It was a TP-Link mesh network. The only thing that would bring the thing up was to reboot every single router in the network and not connect that notebook.
I tried update my routers, tried to update my notebook wifi firmware, tryed to change the router config, the router position, the router order, the wifi channel, the wifi name and password. Nothing worked. But if I connected using linux, things would work just fine.
In the end I divorced my wife and brought a Thinkpad. She keeped the cat, the house, the routers and that dell vostro notebook.
I keeped the dog and the car.
I once moved into a new apartment, built a new PC, but noticed that every 30 or so minutes while gaming my monitor would turn off. It was just frequent enough to make gaming intolerable. One day I was plugging something in and moved my DisplayPort cable slightly and my monitor turned off again. Turns out it was too close to the antennas for the WiFi card I had; it was inducing a current in the DisplayPort cable and the monitor’s firmware didn’t know what to do so it just crashed! I moved the cable slightly further away and it never happened again.
My first thought was atmospheric effects, i.e. along the lines of "The radio only works at night": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear-channel_station
Also worth reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sporadic_E_propagation
I must say, the AI-generated "stock image" doesn't add that much to the article and could be done without, especially when its alt-text contains the prompt.
>With a bit of work, my dad set up a line-of-sight Wi-Fi bridge — a couple of high-gain directional Wi-Fi antennas pointed at each other — between the office and our apartment.
How was that not the first thing to be checked ? OP must have hit themselves over the head for not thinking of that one sooner
Connection only happens when it's rainin', Routers only love you when they're routin', Say carriers, they will come and they will go When the rain fries your motherboard, you'll know, you'll know
On two separate instances 4 years apart in Liberia, the VSAT unit and Asus WiFi router were overheating at peak usage or peak heat times. This must be happening more than is generally realized.
Easiest solution: permanently point a good case-fan-sized USB fan on to the unit, using its own USB port.
Long time ago I had a 10km 2.4ghz wifi link with directional antennas, it worked very well but the throughtput improved with rain.
Directional antenas are far from directional, they pick noise from everywhere.
In my opinion rain reduces that noise, and if the point to point has more than enough signal margin to keep operating at full speed, it ends up improving the link.
Something like horse blinders.
Huh, my initial expectation was wrong! I figured (even until close to the end of the article) that the problem was a dramatic increase in the amount of wi-fi or other 2.4GHz traffic in the area leading to interference, some of which was blocked by rain thus allowing more stable local connections.
The 2 April 1st posts on the front page right now have me questioning the date...
Man having dealt with so many wireless issues I already had a shortlist when I read fixed wireless was involved.
Either the radios were misaligned and the rain was reflecting it back towards a stable link just enough to improve throughput.
Or
The rain took a bad link all the way down, failing over to a different link.
Or
The rain/wind was moving an obstruction.
I have about a million of these stories sadly.
"The internet goes down on tuesdays"
Crane.
"The internet goes out in the morning"
Temperature inversion.
> The fix was easy: cut down the tree
This reminds me of the printer that never prints on Tuesdays.
I was fully prepared for the wet walls of the building to act as a reflector.
I'm surprised WiFi can't pass on reliably through branches. Must have been a nightmare back then.
A client had a weird problem with data flowing 10x faster in one direction between two parts of its campus on either side of a road, ~30Y ago...
http://d.hd.org/anecdotes.html#NFS
TL;DR: kinked fibre causing large (NFS) packets to fail frequently in one direction
Reminds me of an old joke:
I expected this
The fix was easy: Prune the branches. than
>The fix was easy: upgrade our hardware. We replaced our old 802.11g devices with new 802.11n ones, which took advantage of new magic math and physics to make signals more resistant to interference.
Kind of tangentially related to weird ways tech works: a few weeks ago I finally disassembled my original DMG-01 Game Boy to fix it. There was decades of battery acid corrosion that took a ton of cleaning and resoldering and reflowing the screen connections.
After hours and hours of iterations I could get it to work perfectly, just once, for each cartridge. I would clean it a bit more, try a game, things would work great. I’d try another game and it the copyright logo would fail. So I’d clean it up a bit more. Swab the port and try it again. It worked! Then another game… nope.
I eventually realized that the isopropanol was making a weak connection work fine, and then I guess it just kept working once power was flowing.
No matter what I tried I couldn’t get it to stay fixed, so I keep a handful of cotton swabs and a small dispenser of isopropanol in the carrying case. I’ll swab a cartridge before inserting it and it works every time.
So now I have a Game Boy that requires alcohol to work.
We had a Time Warner tech blame moisture in the air impacting the (sheathed) cable for an outage.
I once had a s775 gigabyte motherboard which would bluescreen on each cold boot. after the bluescreen it would boot successfully - this was both in windows and linux. the workaround was to wait for the bios beep and then hit reset. it worked like that for 6 years lmfao.
same computer did not start if any of its metal surfaces touched the wall, but that might have been a electrical leak - thankfully i do not live at that dump still
Just a guess. But after the first couple of paragraphs I realized it was a tree. Kept reading. Yup. Tree.
The rain would move branches out of the way.
This is why experience helps. Good life and professional experience helps to short circuit many problems.
(2024)
Discussion then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39896371
Related:
We can’t send mail farther than 500 miles (2002)
I've collected a list of fun stories of this form and post them when this comes up:
- Car allergic to vanilla ice cream: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt
- Can't log in when standing up: https://www.reddit.com/r/talesfromtechsupport/comments/3v52p...
- OpenOffice won't print on Tuesdays: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cupsys/+bug/255161...