Rain Fade

What is it?

Rain Fade is when the rain washes the wireless Internet away, temporarily. We have experienced rain fade by heavy down pours of rain and our high capacity wireless links are interrupted, and brief outages of service have occurred.

Why does CG Comm. experience it now?

For many years in our coverage area, we were in a drought and the light rain did not cause an issue with wireless Internet services. Also, we were using hardware that was not affected much by rain; however, due to higher bandwidth usage and demands we needed to upgrade our hardware to support higher capacities.

To provide higher capacities of data bandwidth, CG Comm. switched to higher frequency wireless links. The higher the frequency, the higher the probability of rain fade during heavy storms.

What is CG Comm. doing to overcome Rain Fade?

CG Comm. has already installed redundant wireless links that switch between the higher capacity links to links that are able to continue to run during the rain.

Does that mean I won’t lose any packets?

No, packet loss may still occur. There are many variables and factors that can cause packet loss. Your data goes through routers, firewalls, switches, bridges, repeaters, access points, servers, etc.  to reach you. We have seen that when the primary links drop, there may be some packet loss while the secondary links switch the data stream.