Comment by nunesvn
2 years ago
I don't know if this is fake, but it could be true. I had a similar situation working for a WISP around 2010.
Every night, for about 10 minutes, the connections from our HQ to a relay tower became flaky. At the time we were using two Mikrotik 5GHz cards and some large antennas.
You could sit in front your computer and wait, a few minutes after the sunset, for the monitoring alerts start arriving. After a week trying everything, including changing hardware (to the same specs), I was very disappointed with the thing and got out to smoke around the sunset.
Then some huge lamps we had around the building switched on, based on a light sensor. Immediately I received the SMS alerts on my phone. I ran into the building, turned off the external lights and bingo: 0% packet loss.
It turns out that the building management had changed all of external lamps the week before, with new sodium-vapor bulbs. And for some reason, on the first 5 to 10 minutes with these lights on, it caused very high interference on the 5GHz band.
Changed the lamps, problem solved.
> And for some reason
The ballast and the bulb itself are quite noisy in RF and then they are heating up they even more noisier.
I am just surprised that line of sight issues weren't the first thing checked when you have a bespoke line of sight networking setup, especially when there was no local packet loss.
That whole article felt oddly empty. Like you could read the title and conclusion and be totally fine and satisfied.