Building Networks to Handle Video Protected Experience During Pandemic

As it turns out, building access networks meant to handle entertainment video and content has other benefits, such as protecting user experience when a sudden spike in usage happens. That was not expected, back in 2009, and seems to have been a major reason why global internet access networks did not crash during the Covid-19 pandemic. 

Basically, ISPs and wide area network providers expect traffic to grow as much as 40 percent every year, and have built their networks to match. 

The other important change arguably is that lots of content, application and transaction platform firms build their own private global networks, which has the effect of adding much more capacity to the global network than would have been the case if the primary suppliers were telcos. 

In a serious pandemic, U.S. businesses, government agencies and schools could experience absenteeism (or forced dispersal of workers as precautionary measure) that could reach 50 percent or higher ranges, thereby displacing Internet access demand from normal daytime sites to homes, predicted a 2009 study by the Government Accountability Office.

The GAO expected residential internet access to be disrupted, as the networks are “not designed to handle this unexpected load.”

Of course, a pandemic did happen in 2020, did result in the shutdown of most of the economy, people did have to stay at home, away from school and work. But the feared internet access disruption never happened. 

In fact, the percentage of people required to stay at home vastly exceeded the 50 percent figure the GAO assumed. It was virtually 100 percent in most parts of the United States. But the networks proved resilient, in most parts of the globe, despite an immediate increase of internet access data volume between 30 percent and 45 percent. 

For the week of March 15 to March 21, 2020, as people were ordered to stay at home,  internet access services in 200 U.S. cities maintained service levels, though 13.5 percent of cities had seen average speed dips of 20 percent of typical ranges, according to Broadband Now. 

In late March and early April, consumer traffic was up possibly 30 percent to 40 percent in affected countries where stay at home policies were in effect. 

The reason seems to be that internet service providers have built their networks to handle ever-growing traffic volumes. Doing so meant they had headroom to handle the sudden traffic upsurge. It arguably also helped that today’s networks are built to handle video bandwidth as a routine matter. 

Video is the widely-used app that is most demanding of network bandwidth, and also drives nearly zero incremental revenue unless the ISP owns the content, which in the streaming era only applies to a few big ISPs. Even then, no ISP owns more than a fraction of all the streamed content. 

The point is that the networks must be built to handle video, and lots of it. A byproduct is that bandwidth to support work from home, email, VoIP, web content, database access and conferencing is, if not trivial, relatively easy. 

An earlier  2007 DHS study was said to “confirm that the increased traffic generated in neighborhoods during a severe pandemic is likely to exceed the capacity of the providers’ aggregation devices in metropolitan residential neighborhoods.” That has not proven to be the case. 

Notably, the GAO report said that at 40 percent of absenteeism (workers forced to stay home),  “at the 40 percent absenteeism level, the study predicted that most users within residential neighborhoods would likely experience congestion when attempting to use the Internet.” 

The Covid-19 pandemic caused close to 99 percent stay at home behavior. 

The point is that predictions always are hard to make. In this case, ISPs built robust networks that were able to handle the absolute worst case scenario for internet usage caused by a pandemic, with only a slight slowing of peak speeds. 

That is most welcome, given the dire predictions GAO issued. "Increased use of the Internet by students, teleworkers, and others during a severe pandemic is expected to create congestion in Internet access networks," GAO warned. That did not happen. 

"Localities may choose to close schools and these students, confined at home, will likely look to the Internet for entertainment, including downloading or 'streaming' videos, playing online games, and engaging in potential activities that may consume large amounts of network capacity.” That did happen, but the networks were able to handle the extra load. 

"Additionally, people who are ill or are caring for sick family members will be at home and could add to Internet traffic by accessing online sites for health, news, and other information," GAO added. That seems to have added so little additional strain it would be very hard to measure. 

"If theaters, sporting events, or other public gatherings are curtailed, use of the Internet for entertainment and information is likely to increase even more," GAO said. Indeed, people turned even more to reliance on streaming networks. 

But the networks had been built to handle that demand, so keeping up with relatively low-bandwidth work from home demand was not a problem.