Ask HN: How well did your wireless handle the eclipse load?
I was about 3 miles north of Madras, Oregon, which is a small town of under 7000 in a rural area. My provider is T-Mobile, and they were having a lot of trouble there.
The signal was good, 3 or 4 out of 5, and usually with LTE service, but there just wasn't much bandwidth. I could load simple sites, like HN, fairly often. Anything more complex, though, was spotty at best. There were occasions when I got no service for a few minutes, or it dropped from LTE to Edge.
I was exchanging text messages with a friend who also came to the Madras area, and he too is on T-Mobile. About 3/4 of my messages got an error saying they were not delivered, although we later determined that most of them did get delivered about 8 to 10 minutes after I sent them. We tried a voice call. I could hear him fine, but he said my voice had severe break up.
I stayed for about five hours after the eclipse, hoping that as people left they would stop using bandwidth and I'd be able to get some good internet connectivity so that I could check traffic on several potential routes home, and then decide if I should drive straight home or book a hotel on the way for Monday night and finish the trip Tuesday. That plan didn't work. I guess people driving still had passengers who wanted to pass the time on the net, and many probably also had apps like Waze that want to get traffic and hazard information on the fly.