Will Our New Normal Break the Internet?
By: Darren Chu and Deanna McArthur
Early last week the Q Wave office, like many others, began transitioning staff to a work-from-home model. This meant taking computers and peripherals home, and in the case of our customer care team, their desk phones.
Each of us are using a VPN service to dial in and securely access internal servers. It wasn’t long before we, a small company of 20 employees, were seeing traffic jams in our own network; you can only imagine what it must be like for large corporations trying to transition to a remote work environment!
With businesses shutting down and school closures happening across the country, there has been a significant increase in Internet usage. Online shopping and e-commerce has seen a surge, with fewer and fewer physical storefronts open to customers.
In these extraordinary times, Amazon (and companies like it) have taken on a new role by providing a way for people to get the items they need, whether that be toilet paper, hand sanitizer, or groceries.
Even entertainment has had to go digital, you can now find live stream schedules to watch everything from esports matches to concerts by your favourite artists. Museums and art galleries are also jumping on the digital bandwagon, with many of them offering free virtual tours.
Missing your personal trainer? Get sweaty while maintaining your social distancing by joining in on livestream versions of workouts on social media.
As we settle into the new normal of working, exercising, and entertaining ourselves from home, internet service providers (ISP) are having to adjust the way they do business in order to support the increased network traffic. The large ISPs have had to remove their data overage caps to allow people to remain connected without the worry of additional overage charges at a financially tight time.
At a time when it seems that internet connectivity has transitioned from a luxury to a home essential, there is definitely going to be some strain on infrastructure that was not designed with this particular global scenario in mind.
Many businesses are set up with Internet access differently than residential homes, they use “enterprise grade” broadband service to enable the higher level of bandwidth needed by a larger volume of people. To use a common analogy, businesses send and receive data using a large pipe, while homes use a garden hose.
The current Internet infrastructure is already set up to handle large amounts of traffic at specific times of the day, like when people get home from work or school, but what we are seeing right now is high volumes during off-peak hours. If you’ve noticed some minor slow downs in your Internet service, this is likely why.
According to a Bell spokesperson, home internet usage has been about 60% higher than usual during the day, and 20% higher at night.
What does this mean for your favourite streaming sites? In Europe, Companies like YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon’s Prime Video have committed to reducing bit rate transfers when bandwidth is low. That means users cannot expect 4K when traffic on the networks is high, but at least their stream would have little to no buffering. For now, these bit rate decreases are only occurring in Europe, but if we are expecting COVID-19 to peak in Canada in the coming weeks, it would not be surprising if streaming companies were to do the same here.
So, will this unprecedented increase in web traffic really crash the Internet? Not likely, but we can expect to see more news about the impact COVID-19 is having on the telecommunications industry in the weeks to come.
Each of us are using a VPN service to dial in and securely access internal servers. It wasn’t long before we, a small company of 20 employees, were seeing traffic jams in our own network; you can only imagine what it must be like for large corporations trying to transition to a remote work environment!
With businesses shutting down and school closures happening across the country, there has been a significant increase in Internet usage. Online shopping and e-commerce has seen a surge, with fewer and fewer physical storefronts open to customers.
In these extraordinary times, Amazon (and companies like it) have taken on a new role by providing a way for people to get the items they need, whether that be toilet paper, hand sanitizer, or groceries.
Even entertainment has had to go digital, you can now find live stream schedules to watch everything from esports matches to concerts by your favourite artists. Museums and art galleries are also jumping on the digital bandwagon, with many of them offering free virtual tours.
Missing your personal trainer? Get sweaty while maintaining your social distancing by joining in on livestream versions of workouts on social media.
As we settle into the new normal of working, exercising, and entertaining ourselves from home, internet service providers (ISP) are having to adjust the way they do business in order to support the increased network traffic. The large ISPs have had to remove their data overage caps to allow people to remain connected without the worry of additional overage charges at a financially tight time.
At a time when it seems that internet connectivity has transitioned from a luxury to a home essential, there is definitely going to be some strain on infrastructure that was not designed with this particular global scenario in mind.
Many businesses are set up with Internet access differently than residential homes, they use “enterprise grade” broadband service to enable the higher level of bandwidth needed by a larger volume of people. To use a common analogy, businesses send and receive data using a large pipe, while homes use a garden hose.
The current Internet infrastructure is already set up to handle large amounts of traffic at specific times of the day, like when people get home from work or school, but what we are seeing right now is high volumes during off-peak hours. If you’ve noticed some minor slow downs in your Internet service, this is likely why.
According to a Bell spokesperson, home internet usage has been about 60% higher than usual during the day, and 20% higher at night.
What does this mean for your favourite streaming sites? In Europe, Companies like YouTube, Netflix, and Amazon’s Prime Video have committed to reducing bit rate transfers when bandwidth is low. That means users cannot expect 4K when traffic on the networks is high, but at least their stream would have little to no buffering. For now, these bit rate decreases are only occurring in Europe, but if we are expecting COVID-19 to peak in Canada in the coming weeks, it would not be surprising if streaming companies were to do the same here.
So, will this unprecedented increase in web traffic really crash the Internet? Not likely, but we can expect to see more news about the impact COVID-19 is having on the telecommunications industry in the weeks to come.