How did your network fare during the May 2024 solar storm?

[Eric_Ozrelic]

This mother’s day weekend earth is experiencing a mass solar ejection from the sun, the largest seen in 20+ years! During intense solar storms sensitive electrical equipment including radios and GPS systems can experiencing issues. So far our network has held up very well with no customer complaints or outages. How did your network fare during this storm? Did you experience any outages or measurable performance issues?

One of our employees was able to snap a couple photos of the “northern lights”, a byproduct of intense solar storms. This is in Central Oregon, and features an ePMP F4600c w/27dBi UltraDish, and PTP550 radio’s.

Here’s another shot, different direction, no radios:

[JLLC]

We had some ePMP APs lose GPS sync, but not so many that we pointed at the solar storm so much as it just being a day that ended in “Y.” We did see an uptick in grid power issues and GPS location on my phone was nutty, especially on the Friday afternoon when the storms started.