Whoops, meant to reply to this one too in my previous message. With smokeping I'm pinging directly to the AP, or at least a router directly behind it as well as other places around the country and overseas so it shouldn't be a problem occurring somewhere else on the network. I'll attach a graph showing the pings/loss from today. Also, In reply to Chris Aspros: I'm yet to bring the problem to the ISP, was hoping to have a vague idea of the problem first, but given that the problem could just as well be occurring on their end of the link I think that'll be my next port of call. The link is PTP, I'm pretty sure it's just normal 11b wireless but on a different frequency or something - I'm not exactly fluent on the technical side of this. Thanks again, Michael ________________________________________ From: Ben Deller - Airnet NZ [mailto:ben(a)team.airnet.net.nz] Sent: Tuesday, 1 August 2006 4:22 p.m. To: Michael Davies Subject: RE: [nznog] Wireless link adversly affected by the sun? Hi Michael Perhaps try being more specific in isolating the problem. Is it latency and jitter in the wireless link or past the link out on another network (the internet)? Try the smokeping test to your ISP's network not the internet. Also have you checked you signal and noise levels on the wireless link? (Or asked your ISP to check this) It could be wireless interference from another network. Or it could just be too hot. Ben ________________________________________ From: Michael Davies [mailto:michael(a)hereisasite.co.nz] Sent: Tuesday, 1 August 2006 3:48 p.m. To: nznog(a)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
