New data from Ookla, which runs the popular Speedtest.net broadband connection benchmarking service, has revealed that Storm Éowyn (pronounced ‘Ay-oh-win’) triggered a “rapid, severe and sustained decline” in mobile performance across all operators in Ireland and parts of the UK, particularly Northern Ireland and Scotland, on a “scale not seen before“.
The particularly nasty storm system, which was the result of explosive cyclogenesis (aka – a weather bomb), hit on Friday morning and tore its way across Ireland, as well as Northern Ireland, Northern parts of Wales and Scotland (other parts of the UK also felt the storm, but were spared the worst). In some areas, record wind speeds of up to 114mph were even reported.
Such storms do have an impact on fixed broadband and mobile connectivity, which can be caused by a variety of different factors from storm damage (wind, floods etc.) to power outages and power surges (lightning) etc. Such things, when occurring over a wide area, can impact both network capacity, stability and performance.
Ookla’s data found that, on the day of the storm, median mobile download speeds in Ireland (10.04Mbps) were 78% lower than the preceding 7-day average of 47.43Mbps, while median latency was 23% higher at 47.6ms. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, mobile broadband download speeds at the 10th percentile — a critical metric reflecting the poorest network performance — dropped significantly on the same day, falling by 63% to 2.19Mbps and by 74% to 1.31Mbps, respectively, compared to the 7-day average.
Network disruptions also drove a “dramatic deterioration” in the Quality of Experience (QoE) of bread-and-butter consumer applications. Consistency — an important metric indicating the proportion of Speedtest samples meeting minimum download and upload speed thresholds — dropped sharply on the day of the storm, falling by over 20 percentage points to 60.3% in Northern Ireland and by nearly 40 percentage points to 52.3% in Ireland compared to the preceding 7-day average.
On the day following the storm (25th January), as power restoration efforts were still in their early stages, Video Score — a key indicator of QoE in gaming activities — remained significantly suppressed, falling by over 23 points compared to the preceding 7-day average in Northern Ireland.
Ookla last noted how they saw record daily consumer-initiated Speedtest volumes and a 62% surge in Speedtests conducted via Starlink (SpaceX) connections in Ireland on the storm day, compared to the preceding 7-day average. This, they claim, highlighted the severity of the telecoms infrastructure disruptions as “consumers scrambled to troubleshoot issues and turned to alternative connectivity solutions like satellite“.
The experiences above may also help to underline the importance of Ofcom’s ongoing drive to improve network resilience across the UK (here), which is currently still examining the costly and complicated problem of improving battery backup on mobile networks, as well as at the retail broadband ISP end (here).
The regulator previously noted that only around 20% of all mobile sites in the UK have some backup functionality at the Radio Access Network (RAN) level for more than 15 minutes, while only around 5% of sites are able to withstand a six-hour power loss (excluding battery backup for transmission traffic). But it’s worth remembering that battery backup is not a panacea for all such difficulties.