Weather Service faces Internet bandwidth shortage, proposes limiting key data

Thu Dec 10 22:44:16 UTC 2020

In article <E70F542C-7C91-4CC8-B33C-AB148C7D1950 at humancapitaldev.com> you write:
>
>> On Dec 10, 2020, at 7:27 AM, Mel Beckman <mel at beckman.org> wrote:
>> 
>> This is either some kind of bizarre political maneuver, or bureaucrats at NWS need to be seriously fired and replaced with competent
>people who‘s tech jobs have been waylaid by Covid. 
>
>Not bizarre at all. NWS directly competes with AccuWeather.  AccuWeather has plenty of lobbyists and bipartisan political support. Anything
>that harms NWS helps AccuWeather.

It's more complicated than that. Accuweather like every commerical
weather forecaster gets most of its data from the NWS, then uses its
own methods to make their forecasts. So they want to cripple the front
end of the NWS but not the data gathering back end.

But I do agree that this problem sounds like one that could be solved
with a couple of phone calls to Cloudflare or Akamai and very little
money.

-- 
Regards,
John Levine, johnl at taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly