Ask HN: It’s snowing in Texas and Cellular data is suffering, why?

3 points·mrsmee89··6 comments

I’ve lived in a cold climate where it snows every winter for most of my life and the cell service doesn’t seem to be affected. It snows once in Texas and cell service is notably slower. Is this my imagination or something else going on?

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Pure conjecture here, but if you live in a region where snow is uncommon, it might be the case that the cell towers will be placed farther apart than in regions where there is a lot of snow. Now that it is snowing, the system begins to suffer from tower to tower failures and retransmits.

That makes sense! Thanks

This is just a guess as to what is occurring in your case. Bandwidth is distributed among all the cell sites in range of your phone. With bad weather comes power outages and cell sites have limited battery backup. Cell sites in dense populated areas may get cell techs connecting generators, but some of them will just lose power. That would mean more users sharing a smaller pool of bandwidth. If you know the debug code on your phone to display the cell sites you are connected to and you document the cell site ID's, you can probably tell when some of them vanish. On an iPhone the Field Test Mode is *3001#12345# On Android there are apps to display the Cell ID. On the older flip phones, field test mode numbers vary by vendor.

Maybe the states major backbone's are all using IPoAC[1] and the snow means there's increased packet loss?

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_over_Avian_Carriers

Snow --> Power outages --> internet outages --> increase cell data usage --> cell data suffering.

I imagine the power outages are the main cause. Fewer towers in operation means slower transfer rates...

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