The WiFi only works when it's raining (2024)

Summary

Happy April 1st! This post is part of April Cools Club: an April 1st effort to publish genuine essays on unexpected topics. Please enjoy this true story, and rest assured that the tech content will be back soon! That's what my dad said when I asked what was wrong with our home internet connection. "The Wi-Fi only works when it's raining." Let's back up a few steps, so we're all on the same page about the utter ridiculousness of this situation. At the time, I was still a college student — this was over 10 years ago. I had come back home to spend a couple of weeks with my parents before the fall semester kicked off. I hadn't been back home in almost a full year, because home and school were on different continents. My dad is an engineer who had already been tinkering with networking gear longer than I'd been alive. Through the company he started, he had designed and deployed all sorts of complex network systems at institutions across the country — everything from gigabit Ethernet for an office building, to inter-city connections over line-of-sight microwave links. He is the last person on Earth who would say a "magical thinking" phrase like that. "What?" I uttered, stunned. "The Wi-Fi only works while it's raining," he repeated patiently. "It started a couple of weeks ago, and I haven't had a chance to look into it yet." "No way," I said. If anything, rain makes wireless signal quality worse, not better. Never better! Two weeks without reliable internet? I started a speed-run through the stages of grief... Denial I pulled open my laptop and started poking at the network. Pinging any website had a 98% packet loss rate. The internet connection was still up, but only in the most annoying "technically accurate" sense. Nothing loads when you have a 98% packet loss rate! The network may as well have been dead. I was upset. I had just started dating someone a few months prior, and she was currently on the other side of the planet! How was I to explain that I couldn't stay in...