The Internet is a complex mesh of local, regional, national, and international networks linked together to behave like a single network. Your ability to access a particular network host at any particular instance depends on the status of all the networks that host’s information “packets” must traverse to reach you at UCI. The condition of networks depend on the activities of countless other network users as well as the status of a multitude of network routers and other devices. Frequently, one network or another is congested or suffering from other problems.
The network is much like the weather — some days are nicer than others, and sometimes one part of the world may be experiencing severe thunderstorms while others are basking in sunshine.
NACS has installed the “UCI Internet Weather Report” to help UCI network users get a sense of the condition of the Internet, and UCI’s connection to it. This is a web page that provides a glimpse of the “Internet Weather” at any point of time by summarizing the current “weather” between UCI and hosts on various networks around the country. The network weather is depicted as a color coded bar (green’s good, red’s bad, yellow’s in-between) determined from the amount of network data being “lost” between UCI and the remote host. This data loss is referred to as “dropped packets” and causes transmissions to be repeated until they are successfully received. These retries slow network response time.
To stay in touch with the weather (the UCI Internet weather that is) add a bookmark to the UCI Internet Weather Report:http://weather.uci.edu/