diff --git a/docs/faq.md b/docs/faq.md
index 71ac22c1c2d..70b2d44c7c8 100644
--- a/docs/faq.md
+++ b/docs/faq.md
@@ -223,3 +223,16 @@ RUN poetry install --no-dev
 
 The two key options we are using here are `--no-root` (skips installing the project source) and `--no-directory` (skips installing any local directory path dependencies, you can omit this if you don't have any).
 [More information on the options available for `poetry install`]({{< relref "cli#install" >}}).
+
+
+### My requests are timing out!
+
+Poetry's default HTTP request time out is 15 seconds, the same as `pip`.
+Similar to `PIP_REQUESTS_TIMEOUT`, the experimental environment variable `POETRY_REQUESTS_TIMEOUT`
+can be set to alter this value. As this environment variable is **unstable**, it may be removed in the future, but
+not before being replaced with a permanent alternative.
+
+Note that it is almost always better to debug network stability than to blindly increase
+the request timeout -- the timeout controls how long it Poetry waits to establish a HTTP
+request/connection, and not how long Poetry will wait for a response to finish
+(Poetry will keep on waiting as long as the response is unfinished).
diff --git a/src/poetry/utils/constants.py b/src/poetry/utils/constants.py
index 56bec540ae2..e8fe2918e50 100644
--- a/src/poetry/utils/constants.py
+++ b/src/poetry/utils/constants.py
@@ -1,8 +1,10 @@
 from __future__ import annotations
 
+import os
+
 
 # Timeout for HTTP requests using the requests library.
-REQUESTS_TIMEOUT = 15
+REQUESTS_TIMEOUT = int(os.getenv("POETRY_REQUESTS_TIMEOUT", 15))
 
 RETRY_AFTER_HEADER = "retry-after"