I’ve heard of the opposite, but not heard of light affecting wireless transmission before. Some satellite bands are affected by raindrops of certain size.. I guess its possible though!

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From: Michael Davies [mailto:michael@hereisasite.co.nz]
Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2006 3:48 PM
To: nznog@list.waikato.ac.nz
Subject: [nznog] Wireless link adversly affected by the sun?

Hi there,

As the subject suggests, I’ve been noticing an interesting problem with our internet. We’re lucky enough to be on the receiving end of a wireless net connection running through Trango broadband hardware, fairly conventional wireless tech. However I’ve noticed through monitoring the connection with smokeping to various places around the country that the connection quality seems to decrease dramatically through the middle of the day, but not every day. At first I thought that this was simply related to congestion somewhere, but from following the weather a bit I’ve started noticing that it gets worse on the nice sunny days.

For example: Today, a balmy 17 degrees in Dunedin and beautifully sunny all day. Packet loss and jitter begins to increase at about 9am and peaks about 1pm with 60% loss, then at 2pm as if flicking a switch it returns to nearly 0% loss. From looking at the graphs over time, this does happen quite often but not every day and the loss today is definitely the worst I’ve seen it (but also the warmest/sunniest day we’ve had in Dunedin for quite a while).

Has anyone seen or heard of this happening before? Would there be any way to prevent this – supposing that the sun is the culprit – short of installing a Mr. Burns type sun shield?

Regards,

Michael