It's been raining again. Yesterday it was O'ahu that got hit with torrential rain. Did I mention I live on O'ahu?
What may be of interest to tech people is the effect that the rain has on communications. For example, for the last three weeks, telephone service has been hit or miss. This, as a result of the rain filling the underground pathways that the phone lines run in. It takes days for the lines to dry out. During that time, the phone doesn't ring. Or at least, it doesn't ring as it usually does. What happens is it beeps. Once. If you happen to be near the phone when that happens, you can answer it and get a static filled conversation going. If not, you'll never know that the call came in.
Other communications are also affected. In fact, when it comes to satellites, there is a phrase for it - "rain fade" or sometimes "rain attenuation."
SWMBO and I went to breakfast yesterday morning. The restaurant we went to had background music and also several TVs showing a news channel. But every once in awhile, the music would drop out. We also noticed that when that happened, the news channel would pixelate. That is, the picture would turn into a series of large black blocks as the image degraded. Eventually, as the rain really started falling, the music and TV picture stopped and an error screen was displayed on the TVs saying the satellite signal had been lost. It seems that this restaurant got both its music and TV via direct satellite dish.
From there, needing to fill up our car with gas, we went to the service station. But when we tried to use a charge card, we found that their approval system uses yes, you guessed it, a direct satellite link. Said link was not operational so we couldn't get any gas. Sigh.
Even when we got home, some of our cable TV stations were affected because Hawaii gets its programs via satellite, which are then distributed via cable.
It is amazing to me that so many services rely on satellites, with no apparent backup. Yes, you need a LOT of bandwidth to transmit so much data. And yes, if the phone lines are affected its possible copper data links will be. But, does it make any sense to anyone to rely so much on satellites as a source of transmission without any kind of backup? What about all the miles of "dark" fiber that lay between here and the mainland? Why not use some of that?
If that's not economically feasible, then why not use some of the available techniques to mitigate the affects of rain? I mean, it's not like it never rains here. In fact, the loss of signal is the main reason I haven't switched from cable TV to satellite. Otherwise, I would be there in a flash because satellite is cheaper and the signal is potentially sharper (depending on how much compression the companies use during transmission).
In any case, these are just a couple of examples of how high tech communications are affected by mother nature.
Aloha!
