Getting spotty TV service? It might be due to a sun outage. Learn what a sun outage is and how to avoid it with fiber TV in this explanatory article.
TV service is so consistent these days that it comes as a big surprise whenever we encounter spotty pictures or static-filled channels. From time to time, issues with your TV reception might not be due to a bad reception dish or even any problem with your TV provider. Instead, it could be caused by a sun outage.
That’s right – the sun itself might conspire to ruin your TV watching. Let’s take a closer look at sun outages, explore what they are, and see how you can avoid sun outage-related TV loss by switching to a different TV service format.
In a nutshell, sun outages are brief moments of solar interference for communication satellites orbiting the Earth.
First, a recap: wireless TV signals are beamed down to your receiving dish from satellites that orbit the planet. A complex network of satellites ensures that you get TV service no matter the time of day – there’s always a satellite in the sky overhead for this purpose.
Most of the time, these satellites function perfectly. However, there are occasional times during the year when the sun is directly behind a satellite transmitting TV signals to your home. In these instances, you experience a "sun outage."
In the midst of a sun outage, you could experience a few different side effects, like pixelated pictures, audio distortions, or even complete picture freezes. In the worst cases, you might lose TV service for a few minutes.
But in every case, sun outages stop as soon as the planet's rotation, the satellite's movement, or both cause the sun to no longer hover directly behind the satellite and saturate that area in solar radiation. Sun outages aren't dangerous or long-lasting – at worst, they're minor inconveniences.
Because sun outages are caused by satellites lining up with the sun, astronomers and cable TV providers can calculate when they are likely to occur. Sun outages occur in spring and fall every year and can potentially last for about a week.
Note that this doesn't mean your TV service will be interrupted for seven days in total! A week of potential sun outages just means that a few minutes of service interruption can strike at some point during that timeframe. If you do experience a sun outage, it should only last for 5 to 15 minutes, depending on things like the size of the receiving dish, the exact position of your satellite, and other factors.
Want to know when the next sun outage might affect your area? You can use online sun outage calculators to get some pretty accurate estimates
.
Fortunately, even though sun outages can affect cable TV signals, they don’t affect internet signals or phone lines. These services use different infrastructure, like hard cables buried in the ground, to transmit information from place to place. Therefore, the position of the sun in relation to orbiting satellites doesn’t affect their operations in the same way. Moreover, even people who use satellite internet services haven’t reported experiencing a “sun internet outage.”
If you have an issue with your internet service or phone line, it’s because of something else, even if it coincidentally happens at the same time as a sun outage!
Solar radiation is the overall culprit behind sun outages. But that radiation is usually a manageable amount. In the future, potential solar storms, solar flares, or other solar weather events could have severe and negative effects on the internet and the broader electrical network around the world. Many scientists think that solar storms have the potential to interrupt communications and devastate worldwide infrastructure, causing billions of dollars in damage. The last recorded instance of such a powerful solar storm was the 1859 Carrington Event. Thankfully, people didn’t heavily rely on electronic devices for their daily lives back then!
Remember: a hypothetical solar storm is not the same thing as a sun outage! There’s nothing to be afraid of if your TV service gets interrupted because of the position of a satellite. The radiation that causes a sun outage isn’t strong enough to push through the Earth’s magnetic field and interfere with electronics.
Even though sun outages aren’t very common or long-lasting, they can still be inconvenient, especially if one strikes in the midst of your favorite TV show or a climactic scene.
But there’s no way to truly prevent sun outages, at least with our current level of technology. The only way to reduce the risk of a sun outage is to change your TV service so it relies on satellite signals as little as possible. For example, fiber TV isn’t directly affected by sun outages because it sends TV signals to recipients with cables instead of wireless satellite transmissions.
Fiber TV plans, like the kind we offer at Glo Fiber, are largely immune to sun outages because they don’t rely on transmitting a TV signal via wireless satellite communication. Instead, your TV signal reaches your home through a fiber optic network.
In a nutshell, a fiber optic network uses fiber cables that transmit short light pulses across great distances. Those pulses, therefore, aren’t interfered with by solar radiation. The only sun outages that could impact your fiber TV are those happening at the network service level since their satellites are still susceptible to this type of interference.
On top of that, fiber TV plans offer freedom and flexibility far beyond what you might expect from cable. For instance, Glo Fiber's Entertain plan – just $130 a month! – gives you unlimited access to over 70 channels, live TV streaming, and a hundred hours of cloud DVR recordings. Think of it as internet for your TV.
Sun outages might be annoying when they pop up, but they aren't very common. And if you want to reduce the risk of them even more, there's always fiber TV from Glo Fiber. With top-notch TV access and lightning-fast internet plans up to gig speeds, there are lots of reasons why more Americans than ever are switching to fiber optic. Get in touch with us today or check out our TV plans to learn more!