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Comment by thekevan | Hacker News Reader

This is a bit ridiculous. How can you know that you have a ling of sight element to you network and not check that as the very first thing when you hear about rain effecting the wifi?

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I had that feeling, too, especially when the author talks about climbing up to the endpoint to check the equipment. He knew it was a line of sight microwave link, so the first thing to check is obstruction or reflection by things that can move a little. I was thinking that it might only work when someone had a big flat-sided truck or RV in the right place to reflect the signal around something.

I've had trouble with tree growth in other contexts. A tree once slowly grew tall enough to break the neutral wire on the drop from the power pole to the house. This put overvoltages on some 110V circuits. Computers were fine. Washing machine emitted a burning smell. More recently, tree growth broke a fiber line coming into my house. AT&T lineman came out and restrung fiber for three poles (I'm a ways back from the main road). He saw me running a desktop computer, slowly, tethered to a phone, and once fiber was reconnected, said "Now you're back in 2023".

(Now to get rid of the dead cable. I have dead DirectTV coax, dead cable TV coax from whoever was before Comcast, and dead Pacific Bell copper, all abandoned in place and some of it sagging.)

Have you never spent hours (or even days!) debugging an issue that seemed obvious in retrospect, once all incorrect assumptions have been eliminated?

The retelling let's us know very early that there is a line of sight component, but when you are sitting there in the middle of a world of no internet, you might just think of it as a "link" to the office.

It sounds fake, especially as the solution would be to get the original equipment higher, instead of buying new equipment?

Also why not lay a cable.

It's just from some guy's office to his house, they aren't going to lay a cable across a few city blocks.

(Author here) Worse: to the balcony of our apartment building. Imagine asking your HOA how they'd feel about you mounting your antenna "higher" AKA on someone else's balcony or on the roof above someone else's apartment.

"Just" move it higher vs replace ~10yr old (at the time) equipment with newer, faster equipment that doesn't have the problem? Easy answer if you ask me, and I'd make the same choice again with ~10yrs of retrospect -- the same 802.11n antennas are still there today!

> It sounds fake

I don’t think so. I definitely know tech people who get a particular idea in their head and will debug it to hell and back before taking a step back and realizing the obvious thing they missed. I’ve definitely done it before myself.

> Also why not lay a cable.

It sounds like they were trying to run a network between two properties that weren’t adjacent. They may not have had permission from the neighbor in the middle to lay cable on their property, or it might’ve required laying a cable across a street.

(Author here) Across several city blocks, in fact, and longer than the max range of Ethernet on normal (Cat 5/5e/6) cables.

Past ~300ft/100m, you need a repeater even for Ethernet. We would have needed at least one repeater somewhere along the line, which adds even more cost and complexity on top of needing to get permits from the city and approvals from all the neighbors in between. Anyone that says "just go get a permit from the city" has never tried doing it.

What happens when the tree grows taller? Would the new wifi still go through leaves and branches?

Edit: it probably did as the story is 10 years old.

As for cable, you'd use fiber optic. There is really no need to go with copper in such a case.

Other than that I'd agree about your solution being optimal back then, and now. Btw how did you check the power brick, peak to peak voltage measurements? Bad capacitors is likely the single most common failure.

You omitted to answer the question why the equipment wasnt simply put higher.

Raising the original equipment might not have been possible, and likely would've only been a temporary solution as the tree could keep growing taller.

> Also why not lay a cable.

According to the stories the two bridge endpoints were in different buildings a few blocks apart. You can't just lay a cable in the middle of a public street.

You can't just lay a cable across a public street

Also, if it was roughly 10 years ago then upgrading to N wireless was a good solution anyway. Not only did it solve the problem but it would've given then quicker speeds.

Most likely a fake story. The internet is littered with blogs that make up stories like this to get engagement. After all, this one made it to the top of hackernews.

Chances of getting proof that this happened are zero

Never let reality ruin a nice story

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