Dialup congestion and winter weather
It seems like a lot of people are at home, dialing into the Internet today. There is a major ice storm in the middle of the country, and its pretty much a holiday week elsewhere. Traffic seems to be moving on the major backbones, but some folks in the midwest report some problems dialing in from home.
On Wed, Dec 27, 2000 at 02:26:50PM -0800, Sean Donelan wrote:
on the major backbones, but some folks in the midwest report some problems dialing in from home.
You could say that. My mother lives in one of the hardest-hit areas of Oklahoma, about 10 miles outside of Ada. She reports that for as far as the eye can see in every direction, and all the way into town, every tree is broken, every line is down, and the huge power transmission towers are down. Not just the lines, the towers themselves. Entire cities have been without water for half a day or more, as they were without power for the pumps. Data circuits are not a priority for the repairs, they're more concerned with restoring power to the hospitals and 911 service to residences.
On 27 Dec 2000, Sean Donelan wrote:
It seems like a lot of people are at home, dialing into the Internet today. There is a major ice storm in the middle of the country, and its pretty much a holiday week elsewhere. Traffic seems to be moving on the major backbones, but some folks in the midwest report some problems dialing in from home.
(I'm catching up on old mail, after being on vacation) I worked at an ISP in the Detroit area for a few years, and the seasonal dial-up usage variations were pretty dramatic. Through the spring and summer, as the weather got nicer, we could add large numbers of users and still see the modem utilization stay pretty steady or decline. On the other hand, in the fall and winter, when it was getting rather unpleasant to be outside, we were having to add capacity pretty constantly, even if we weren't adding many users, in order to avoid busy signals. In addition to the capacity that ISPs have to add at that time of year, I assume the CLECs catering primarily to ISPs probably have to make similar adjustments to their trunking capacity at that point, although they probably see that far more closely tied to the number of lines the ISPs are ordering from them. It wouldn't surprise me if non-modem and non-internet phone line use goes up dramatically in that part of the country during the winter as well, but I don't have any actual data to support that. -Steve -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Gibbard scg@gibbard.org
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Sean Donelan -
Shawn McMahon -
Steve Gibbard