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Does severe cold affect dsl/telephone line?

Last response: in Networking
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So I've searched around the net but haven't found any proof for or against this, but a few nights ago it was about 5-10 degrees (F) outside before windchill, and my internet literally slowed to a crawl, 10 kb/s on downloads (normally 600). Bittorrent was untouched however.. could max out my download and upload still, but any other sort of internet traffic both in and out, was crawled. I tried every troubleshooting I could short of a new modem, until people from around my area had the same exact issues I was having.

The next day it was fine, and it was about 30-40 that day with a bit of melting. The 2 days after that, all was fine still, still not THAT cold, nothing below 10. Tonight, it's back to 5 degrees outside before windchill, and the internet has randomly slowed to 10 kb/s again (with bittorrent clients still working fine). It was working fine before this severe cold set in which was a few hours ago, and I ran some errands, made dinner, came down and turned Hulu on and it was acting like I had dial-up.

So.. could the extra cold weather at night be doing this? Or at least partly?

I'd like to see if the metal terminals shrinking might loosen copper wire connections and introduce noise -- but I suspect wet weather is more of a problem.

Possible explanantion is that more people were at home keeping out of the cold and using the internet thus sucking up bandwidth.
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