First Infrastructure Upgrade “Payoff”

The Results Are Coming In

As you know, members are experiencing slower internet speeds with the COVID-19 crisis causing a big increase in internet traffic. This is due to so many people now working, schooling, and watching videos at home; see this article for more info about that internet overload issue.

As we mentioned in that article, we are responding by systematically upgrading our radio network infrastructure. That upgrade is in two main parts: 1) upgrading our main trunk radio connections to our source internet. And 2) upgrading the hundreds of backbone radios that distribute the signal throughout our network.

In truth we had planned to do these upgrades anyway, but much slower, stretching over the year or more ahead. Now, with the Covid-19 crisis, we’ve accelerated the upgrades greatly, trying to get them done fast, with volunteers and contract staff giving up nearly every Saturday to get these upgrades completed.

Part 1 of that, upgrading our main connections to the internet, was partially completed recently. We have more to do but have seen some big improvements. However, what we do there is not effective without the second, the upgrade of hundreds of backbone radios. Doing that will take months to reach through our whole network.

Our First Results

Well, we have now seen some initial results.

An apparent payoff from the upgrades just arrived a week or so ago when volunteers completed the install of new backbone radios within many of our networks above Old Santa Fe Trail, located southeast of Santa Fe. Now, with those local radio upgrades in those neighborhoods complete (along with matching trunk upgrades), we are seeing something that seems significant: The daytime coronavirus work-and-school-at-home internet overload seems to have been mostly solved in those areas.

Now, that said, there are many variables at play here, and we also saw a slight drop in overall daytime internet usage as well in the last few weeks, probably due to people watching lower resolution videos. So the results below may be a coincidence. But we are encouraged by what we see in the graphs ahead.

Graphing the Improvement

Take a look at these upload and download speed test graphs below. These are 24-hour graphs from midnight to midnight, with 12 noon right in the middle. The upper graph is from before the upgrade, and the lower graph from after. Note that, like most ISPs, our delivery systems purposely favor downloads (blue squares) and the systems deprioritize uploads (green triangles). So the relatively slower upload speeds are about what we expect.

The key is, if you look at the daytime download speeds in the graph after the upgrades, you’ll see a big positive change.

Still More Work Needed

We’ve still got a ton more neighborhoods to visit. And as you can also see, even after the upgrade in the recently completed neighborhood, there is still some overload during the 6 to 11 pm evening hours—the hours when so many more people are home and watching videos online. So, we continue to ask all members to cease use of high definition videos until the crisis has passed; please stick with standard definition per this previous article.

The good news is we’ve shown that we might actually be clearing up the worst of the daytime Covid-19 overload in the first neighborhood we upgraded (which was one of the most overloaded by the way). That said, we can’t guarantee each neighborhood will look identical to this one, once upgraded, since each has different demand levels and different AP configurations, and internet loading is hard to predict. But these upgrades are the best next step and we’ll reevaluate as we move forward.

Our Plan

Again, our plan is for our volunteers to systematically work through all neighborhoods in the entire LCWA network, upgrading backbone radios as we go. We don’t have a schedule for this since we are still feeling our way through it, testing what works, and deciding where to go next on the fly. But we hope to be done no later than July or August. As we reach your neighborhood, we will send you an email days ahead of time to warn you when internet will be down during the upgrades. Watch for those emails.