Having worked in Operations at various ISPs in rain-riddled Houston for 1.5 decades, I can say that when it rains, water gets into the copper lines in the ground and caused increased copper-based local loop failures. That experience leaves me open to believe that where the internet backbone is copper based, when it rains, failures may ensue due to old or improperly installed outside plant and could cause failures which would slow down the internet. I would also conjecture that more people would be on line during bad weather, so that internet usage would increase and perhaps over-wrought links (copper or otherwise) could have some congestion. Finally, in those places where the internet is experienced through wireless links, some may see weather related slow downs. On Oct 9, 2009, at 5:38 PM, Dragos Ruiu wrote:
Well, since it's been documented that internet speed / usage varies with the weather (it gets faster when it's sunny, slower when it rains) I'm sure some seasonal correlation could be found.
Could you point to the documentation? I having trouble with language that sounds like one concept and I suspect is in fact another. Take as one example the basic digital signaling hierarchy. The specifications call for a certain rate plus or minus some number of parts per million. If they are within tolerance, the amount that they would speed up or slow down is measured in a pretty small number of bits per second. So I don't think the speed of the links is materially changing. If on the other hand we are discussing the volume of traffic using that available capacity, it is absolutely clear that there are diurnal, weekly, and seasonal variations as well as growth in time. Are we talking about bit rate, which one might expect to be modified by environmental characteristics and is in fact very tightly controlled to prevent that, or traffic volume?