Will the weather affect my latency?

General Discussion
1

It’s snowing pretty hard where I am, and just curious if it’ll make me lag more.

I don’t wanna be stuck playing Torb or Brig. :sweat_smile:

(I’m usually around 40-50ms)

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2

Copper wire use to get affected by it, but it does not seem to affect fibre.
Same for me 45-50ms.
55ms on bad days.

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3

It depends on your setup. With full wireless to your house it can have a bit of an impact. With both wired and wireless connections, you might lag more if you have a shared connection (as opposed to dedicated) - that’s because there is a possibility that, as it is snowing, more people are inside and using their internet. Particularly with wireless and cellular it can cause a very heavy load on the infrastructure around you and cause you to have problems.

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4

Weather does effect quite a bit between you, Your home, your ISP and your destination path to Blizzard’s data centers. Especially copper lines.

5

It depends on how hard it affects your ISP, to be honest.

6

As someone who works at an ISP:
Weather conditions have many many points between you and the server where it can affect your connection.

Snow on lines making their connection intermittent with weight by pulling on cables, temperatures causing components to shrink or freeze or expand, water getting into equipment or enclosures and causing outages, ice on the road causing people do drive into poles and stuff so your connection has to be rerouted.

So yes, it does. Just having snow in the air does nothing, but it can increase problems in the system and change your connection or break it.

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7

I find my internet is worse when it’s raining, which has been often recently. I live in Australia so I have never dealt with snow, however!

Apparently I have fibre…doesn’t seem to matter, unfortunately…Might also be because I have to use a wireless connection as well.

8

if your on a telephone/POTS line (DSL) it certainly would while a properly setup cable/coax system it shouldn’t effect that at all while fiberoptic you dont have to worry about any interference

9

Rain notoriously messes with all kinds of things and while it may not generally mess with fiber directly, other things going down in the network due to the rain might affect you. Say one connection goes down that goes to a business district. That traffic has to be rerouted, possibly through equipment you are also being routed through. This causes tiny stutters as the routing goes to it’s “protection” path and affects bandwidth available. Also, while fiber doesn’t care about conductivity, water directly on fibers can mess with it’s light transmission and create low light conditions which would also mess with your connection.

Source: My job sucks when the weather is bad. All sorts of stuff breaks.

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10

Thanks for the explanation, that makes a lot of sense.

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11

Easy way is to check through the official blizzard site .it tells you if anything is wrong .

https://us-looking-glass.battle.net/
12

Well, depends. How much snow? Where u live? Do u have a sattelite? U run on Internet and WiFi or the Ethernet? Many questions that r not answered, and probs more if u ask some1 who knows their technology to an extreme.

13

4-6 inches, Utah, no satellite, Wifi internet.

Dunno if that helps any.

14

for snow probably not, but not impossible. rain/thunder yes

15

Want the lie or the truth?

16

Thank god?? No, thank the engineers for your stable connection.