Does Internet Speed Vary by Season?
Joe Greco
jgreco at ns.sol.net
Sun Oct 11 23:22:03 UTC 2009
> Maybe I'm way off.. Maybe its view of KISS but as engineers we should
> all be looking for the simplest answer. To me they key in Dragos'
> post was usage. All physics aside, the warm weather (seasonal) people
> go out more, use the internet less. In cold months, we stay in, use
> the net more. As for document any of us that run networks have seen
> this well document going back many years in our mrgt graphs. But
> then maybe he was refering to the physics, and I just try to simplify
> things to much.
Usage has an effect on overcommit, yes.
However, when you notice that the average connect speed goes down for a
day or two after a cold heavy rain, that's not usage. There are not
more than one modems connecting(*) to a port. So you have established
that something about the quality of the physical layer has been affected.
... JG
(*) In the late 1990's, I heard the most astonishing claims made by a new
entrant into the Milwaukee ISP market, about how some of the "other" ISP's
"shared" lines between customers and this decreased your speeds. They had
no clue who I was, so I engaged their technical person for a while who set
out to convince me that other ISP's really _did_ do this mythical line-
sharing - multiple modems to one port. Until I started talking about the
technical aspects, that is.
--
Joe Greco - sol.net Network Services - Milwaukee, WI - http://www.sol.net
"We call it the 'one bite at the apple' rule. Give me one chance [and] then I
won't contact you again." - Direct Marketing Ass'n position on e-mail spam(CNN)
With 24 million small businesses in the US alone, that's way too many apples.
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