Dealing with Internet Demand Overload
Here at LCWA, we’ve had a huge surge in new requests for internet access. We are getting multiple requests for new accounts each day—we’ve never seen anything like it!
And within our existing membership, we are seeing way more internet usage than ever before. With all this demand, the internet is slowing down.
Worldwide Phenomenon
This slowdown is happening all over the world by the way. Internet usage is surging everywhere, primarily due to so much high-bandwidth video use. This is of course due to so many people working and schooling at home with video conferencing.
For example, here is an article about the impact of schooling at home on the internet and on home-school servers: https://onezero.medium.com/a-wave-of-online-students-is-clogging-up-the-internet-27a5025c5631
But increased demand is also due to people entertaining at home more, instead of going out. Movie streaming and game streaming is at an all-time high.
All this demand has pushed the internet to the brink in many geographic areas around the world. Big cities with widespread fiber optic connections are doing okay. But in places not hooked up to high-capacity fiber, users are suffering.
The New Normal
Clearly, this is yet another case where COVID-19 has undone our expectations of what is “normal.” We all deserve and should have good internet access, right? Well, in a perfect world, yes. But the world is changing so fast due to COVID-19 that companies, governments, technology, and people simply cannot adjust fast enough.
LCWA Internet Speeds: Slowing, But Better than Most Rural Santa Fe Providers
So, all this means that LCWA internet speeds are suffering, particularly during the Netflix Hours of 6pm to midnight. While we’ve done a ton of upgrades, we are still seeing download speed drops as much as 60% in places in our network during those hours. And in many places we are seeing download speed drops of about 25% during the workday due to so much video conferencing—with daytime drops even up to 50% happening in some parts of the network. And expect upload speeds to be even worse, about half of the download speeds.
All that said LCWA is doing much better than most other rural Santa Fe internet providers! That’s what we keep hearing from our members who have multiple internet sources—they say that LCWA has the least drop in speed.
It’s because we are responding with backbone upgrades as fast as we can. We really do care about our members and the quality of their service. As a nonprofit and community organization, we do this purely from a community-service point of view. We are not focused on income, rather we are focused on supporting our members (as best we can with our limited volunteers).
Whack-a-Mole on Backbone Upgrades
In terms of backbone upgrades to solve underlying speed issues, we are upgrading segments of our backbone radios nearly every week, and we are spending tens of thousands of dollars each month on these upgrades. But we still have a lot more work to do. Why such a big project?
Unfortunately, it’s turned out to be harder than we thought. We hoped to have sufficient upgrades in place by early fall. However, we are well into September and we are now finding that we are playing a bit of a whack-a-mole game on those upgrades.
What I mean by that is this: Once we upgrade one key slow radio segment, we find the bottleneck simply moves to another linked radio segment that we originally thought was fine. So, we have to plan and do upgrades there, too. Each upgrade takes weeks to plan, buy equipment for, and then install. Clearly, this is an ongoing process and will not be solved overnight.
Also, bandwidth demand keeps increasing more and more as students return to online school this fall, and as work over the internet increases. We are trying to keep up!
Treat Our Volunteers Well
Our volunteers and staff really are working as fast as they can to respond to the unprecedented demand for internet these days. Some are working more hours than ever, and most for zero income. Most of them enjoy the service roles they are playing, but many are getting a bit tired, too.
So, if you have interactions with our volunteers, be nice! Every once in a while, we get a call or an email from a member who says, “You are not meeting my internet needs!” Well, welcome to the club! That’s happening all over the world. But our volunteers and staff are trying!
So again, please be patient as we respond to outages and slowdowns that will inevitably roam throughout our network.
Specifically, if your internet slows down for an hour or two here and there, don’t call us to complain. That’s standard fare these days in the internet world—please just wait it out. We won’t be able to do anything anyway, and it takes time to respond to such calls.
Of course, any full outage that lasts more than an hour you should notify us about. Use our support@lcwireless.net email address first if you can access email, say over your cell phone. If not, use our 800 number.
But always listen to our 800 status line before contacting us (800-536-6149, option 1). There may be a known outage going on, and a barrage of emails or voice mails to us about such a known outage is not helpful—it just distracts from the repair efforts.
Also, during an outage, don’t call us asking us to call you to personally tell you how things are going. Our volunteers are too busy for one-on-one handholding like that! We’ll update the 800 status message as we learn more.
Treat Other Members Well Too: Use Less Video
And also, be kind to the other members on our network. When you stream videos at night, please use the lower-quality settings. For example, never use a 4K setting—that will kill your connection—and even kill your neighbor’s connection. Also, try to avoid HD shows when possible. We’ve got information about how to control streaming video quality at this link. https://lcwireless.net/please-cease-high-definition-video-streaming-during-the-covid-19-crisis/
And finally, when you have a virtual online conference, do you really need to have the video turned on? Unless really needed, why not turn off video during conferences. You can still share computer screens, etc., but just do not turn on you video camera. If everyone does that, it will make a big difference.
Things you Can Do to Deal with Slower Speeds
Okay, so I just said your internet may be running slower due to COVID-19. Are they any things that you can do to improve your experience in your house?
The number one thing you can do is to use Ethernet rather than Wi-Fi for critical internet activities like work conferences or schooling. No matter how good your router is or how good your computer is, Wi-Fi will always run slower than a directly connected Ethernet network in your house. This is the number one thing you can do to improve speed. See this article about how to do that.
But that does not guarantee faster speed if you have other issues in your house. There are a number of points in the following article that might help you find other home-based speed bottlenecks: https://lcwireless.net/lcwa-internet-speed-truths/