What are sun outages and how do they affect my cable service?
Each Spring and Fall, cable companies experience a technical phenomenon called “sun outages.” For a period of about 2 weeks, the sun causes “solar interference” to all geostationary satellite signals. As the sun’s path across the sky gets lower each day, there are times when it is in a direct line behind a communication satellite that is sending signals to a receiving satellite dish here on earth. When the dish antenna is looking into the sun, the interference from the sun overrides the signals from the satellite. This is when a sun outage occurs.
