This morning we suffered a networking failure which meant we couldn’t stream the entire service, and only captured the first few minutes.
What happened?
Shortly after the start of the service, we began to see signs of unexpected buffering on our video stream. A few minutes after this we lost all internet connectivity in the church. We quickly tracked this down to a complete failure of the wireless bridge between the church and the Community Centre, but were unable to restore the connection.
Why did this happen?
We don’t know. It’s possible that the cold temperatures were having an impact on the equipment we use for the wireless bridge and the timing of the failure was entirely coincidence. The equipment, however, is intended for use outdoors and should be comfortable operating in a much wider range of temperatures. For this reason, we’re wary of naming the weather as the culprit.
What are we doing to fix it?
In the short term, we’ve re-angled one of the receivers which has become knocked during routine maintenance to make sure we always have the strongest possible connection between the two buildings.
In the long term, we’ll investigate the feasibility of installing a permanent fibre-optic link between the two buildings so that we’re unaffected by issues such as signal alignment and weather in future.