Fixed Network Bandwidth Caps Might be Unnecessary, to Prevent Congestion

Many predictions prove quite false. Consider the 2009 study of pandemic impact on internet access by the U.S. General Accountability Office. That study warned that, in a serious pandemic, “increased demand during a severe pandemic could exceed the capacities of Internet providers’ access networks for residential users and interfere with teleworkers in the securities market and other sectors.”

Pointedly, the report said “DHS (Department of Homeland Security) has not developed a strategy to address potential Internet congestion.” As it turns out, internet service suppliers, in the normal course of supporting their businesses, built networks robust enough that measures to deal with internet congestion simply were not needed. 

It is worth noting that the report suggested “an influenza pandemic could result in 200,000 to 2 million deaths in the United States.” Though any loss of life is lamentable, that prediction has not proven close to correct. 

“Increased use of the Internet by students, teleworkers, and others during a severe pandemic is expected to create congestion in Internet access networks that serve metropolitan and other residential neighborhoods,” the report warned. 

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. 

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. 

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. 

If nothing else, the stay-at-home orders put into place to combat the Covid-19 pandemic have stress-tested consumer internet access networks. 

That raises the question of whether data caps for fixed line services actually are necessary for the oft-stated reason of preserving quality of experience by reducing potential congestion. 

Most consumers seem to understand that mobile networks likely require more management, have less bandwidth and are more prone to actual congestion than fixed networks. At least that is what a Government Accountability Office survey might suggest. 

Fixed networks might be another matter. To be sure, use or non-use of usage caps is a business issue, not a technology issue. The pandemic performance pretty much confirms that. To wit, bandwidth caps are not needed, on today’s fixed networks, to prevent congestion. The consumer networks were able to handle the sudden and unexpected demand creating by nearly everyone staying away from work and school. 

The next question is whether a significant number of large ISPs will decide there is market advantage to be gained by dropping the bandwidth caps, increasing them substantially (it should not matter, in terms of congestion), or abandoning caps altogether. 

The performance of networks suggests it is technically safe to do so. The issue is whether business policies will change, or not.

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.

Why Some Users Find 5G Unsatisfying

5G value is an issue for some users who have bought it, especially in some markets where low-band spectrum has been the way 5G is mostly experienced. But there arguably are reasons why user experience could be challenged even in markets where mid-band spectrum underpins 5G experience.

One reason is the difference between what users do--and what the networks must support--on fixed and mobile networks. Fixed networks are multi-use networks. So the obvious value in a fixed network setting is "speed" or "bandwidth" to support multiple simultaneous users.

That is not the case on mobile networks, where accounts are set up on a one device, one user basis. Even when there are multiple users on a single account, those users do not "share" a local access connection. So the advantage of "speed" is different on a mobile network.

There is no "sharing" of a single connection. Also, fixed networks support screens of many sizes. Mobile networks mostly support very-small screen devices. That shapes bandwidth demand.

Apps typically used on large screen or medium-screen devices further shape bandwidth demand. Entertainment devices such as 4K TVs will consume more bandwidth than standard-definition or high-definition viewing on very-small screens.

Mobile-connected devices supporting artificial reality are the exception, at the moment, but also are relatively rare. And even many of those use cases rely on a local Wi-Fi connection, not the mobile network.

Up to a point, bandwidth affects user experience. Just as surely, additional bandwidth does not improve experience, once a threshold is reached. Latency and jitter also matter, but users might not be able to discern such changes, or wrongly attribute the lack of perceived improvement to "bandwidth" issues.

But if 4G provides any evidence, 5G value is going to change over the lifespan of the network. 

The initial value will be “speed,” even if user experience is less changed than some will expect, even if the perceived value is the marketing value of 5G delivering data faster, irrespective of user experience value.

The value after a decade will be “new use cases” and apps, for consumers and business use cases. But that will take time. And consumers might well find there is "not much difference" between 4G use cases and new 5G apps. They have not been created yet.

The betting early on is that many--perhaps most--of the new use cases will come from enterprise, not consumer uses. 

After a decade or so, we are likely to have discovered new consumer apps as well. It just is hard to say what those mass deployed use cases will be. Perhaps nobody predicted the emergence of ride sharing as an important 4G use case. 

Few predicted turn-by-turn navigation would be important. And though streaming video and audio were foreseen, even those apps do not rely so much on “speed” as the creation of easy-to-use and popular streaming apps.

In fact, the rise of “mobile-first” apps does not depend, strictly speaking, on bandwidth improvements brought by 4G, though faster speeds are an enabler. 

That would not be unusual for a next-generation mobile network, up to a point. If nothing else, coverage is an issue, early on. Even a better network does not help if it is not “generally available.”

Complicating matters is the rollout of 5G during the Covid pandemic and many restrictions on “out of home” and “on the go” usage. Working or learning remotely, many users likely spend most of their time connected to home Wi-Fi. So even if 5G is faster, the amount of time any single user might use it is far more limited than under normal circumstances. 

Still, faster speeds should help, up to a point, with existing applications, as page loading on a 600-Mbps fixed network connection should provide some noticeable advantages compared to a 300-Mbps connection (especially in multi-user and simultaneous multi-device usage cases. 

Since 3G, the key user experience gain has been “faster mobile data access.” Sometimes that is tangible; but sometimes not so much.

An argument can be made that latency has even greater user experience impact on a mobile network. Beyond some relatively low point, additional speed might not improve user experience. We can debate what that threshold is, as it changes over time. 

If a consumer’s primary reason for buying 4G was a tethering experience closer to fixed network experience, the 4G advantage was immediately tangible. If the primary advantage sought was mobile web browsing experience similar to fixed network experience, then the advantage might well have been tangible. 

5G poses a bit of a tougher problem. When downstream 4G speeds are routinely in the 20 Mbps to 30 Mbps to 35 Mbps range, how much does experience change when 5G offers 165 Mbps? It should help, but how much?

It depends on what a user does on a phone. Web page loading will be faster, but how much faster? Ignore for the moment the authoring of a web page (optimized for mobile access or not; how well optimized). 

For fixed network access, faster access speeds have not necessarily meant that web pages are loading faster, for example. 

On mobile networks, connection speeds have improved, but mobile page load times tracked by have increased, according to the Nielsen Norman Group.

source: Nieslen Norman Group 

Of course, page and landing page loading times are not a direct function of access speed but perhaps largely an artifact of remote server performance. So access speed is not the only, or perhaps not even primary determinant of user experience. 

The build-out phase of a national next-generation network takes years, so coverage outside of urban cores will typically be an issue. In some markets, where low-band and millimeter wave frequencies have been the mainstay, users might not often find there is much mobile data performance difference.

Will the Digital Divide Always Exist? Will it Matter?

To get funding, any advocacy group must first demonstrate that a problem exists. To keep getting funds, an entity has to insist no progress is being made, necessitating continued funding. And if the original problem actually is solved, the entity has to find some new problem that needs to be solved. 

All that applies to “broadband access,” no less than any other undertaking we might consider worthwhile. Despite much data indicating that internet access (mobile and fixed) is getting substantially better and has held up very well as nationwide stay-at-home policies were put into place because of the Covid pandemic, not every community has been so fortunate. 

Oxnard, Calif., for example, was one such place, seeing a dip in downstream speeds of about 20 percent from mid-March to mid-April, although performance now is moving back up post-mid-April, according to BroadbandNow, using test data from M-Lab. 

The community where I live experienced a 32 percent dip in downstream speed during the same period. Those are the stats. 

What I can say in my own case is that the dip in top speed happened on a connection that normally runs (depending on hour of the weekday) between 130 Mbps and 200 Mbps. The dip was brief, lasting perhaps a week, and did not cause any actual degradation of user experience.

The point is that statistics are one thing; user experience can be quite another matter. The median pre-Covid speed was described as between 75 Mbps and 93 Mbps (half faster, half slower). 

Multi-user households buying lower-speed services might have experienced issues. That was not my own experience, but differences, gaps and disparities exist, and might continue to exist in the future, for all sorts of reasons. 

Consumers make choices. They might decide to buy more-affordable services that can be stressed in multi-user households. Some, in single-user households, might decide to rely on mobile access only. None of that is necessarily a failure of policy, but an expression of consumer choices, or demand. 

Supply is an issue, though. In many communities, though served by gigabit cable networks, telcos still sell digital subscriber line services that are demonstrably slower. 

Still, one analysis by Fastly suggests that even the most-challenged digital subscriber line networks in the United States held up under the new at-home load. Cable TV networks also have held up well.

source: Fastly

According to Ookla, U.S. internet access speeds  on fixed networks dipped about four percent during the pandemic. Mobile speeds actually improved by one percent. 

Most of you are familiar with speed tests. Most of you also know you test your connections primarily when they seem “slow.” Almost nobody bothers to test when the networks are humming along. 

And M-Lab tests have increased significantly during the stay-at-home policies, suggesting customers are aware of greater congestion or slower experienced speeds. 

That would hardly be surprising, as all studies show at-home internet access data volume has grown 40 percent or so as people have been forced to work and learn at home. 

A study by Fastly also indicates speed and income are related. That should not be surprising. Lots of consumer behaviors and spending patterns are correlated with income, education, wealth and geography. Up to 20 percent of U.S. consumers also say they rely on mobile internet access, and do not buy fixed network access. Rural speeds tend to be slower than urban speeds. Rural use of the internet, PC ownership and income also seem to be lower than in urban areas. 

The point is that there always will be room to argue that a digital divide continues to exist, even if it is narrowing and has been narrowing for a couple of decades. And statistics often too-casually dismiss the many nuances as speeds are improving fast. 

But differences might always exist.  Since networks are expensive, the last two percent of locations will always be an economic issue. We might solve the basic speed issue, improving delivery from 10 Mbps to 25 Mbps to some higher figure. But urban networks will keep improving as well, so a gap might always exist.

Pandemic Would Impair Residential Broadband, GAO Says

In a serious pandemic, residential Internet access demand is likely to exceed the capacity of Internet providers’ network infrastructure, says the Government Accountability Office. That means enterprise and government disaster recovery efforts that depend on residential broadband connections may not work as planned, GAO warns.

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, says the Government Accountability Office.

But residential broadband networks are not designed to handle this unexpected load, and could interfere with teleworkers in the securities market and other sectors, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

Oddly enough, robust network neutrality measures, such as forbidding any prioritization of bits, could render impotent one obvious way of handling the sudden explosion of traffic.

"Private Internet providers have limited ability to prioritize traffic or take other actions that could assist critical teleworkers," GAO says. "Some actions, such as reducing customers’ transmission speeds or blocking popular Web sites, could negatively impact e-commerce and require government authorization."

In other words, laws and rules that forbid "packet discrimination" would impair ability to prioritize more-important work-related uses of the residential Internet.

"Increased use of the Internet by students, teleworkers, and others during a severe pandemic is expected to create congestion in Internet access networks that serve metropolitan and other residential neighborhoods," GAO warns.

"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," GAO says.

"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 adds. "This increased and sustained recreational or other use by the general public during a pandemic outbreak will likely lead to a significant increase in traffic on residential networks."

"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 says. At-home workers will only compound the problem.

Oddly enough, the mechanisms ISPs could use to prioritize bandwidth so that a suddenly-scarce resource can be managed are precisely the tools strong "network neutrality" forbids.

"A provider could attempt to reduce congestion by reducing the amount of traffic that each user could send to and receive from his or her network," says GAO. "Such a reduction would require adjusting the configuration file within each customer’s modem to temporarily reduce the maximum transmission speed that that modem was capable of performing—for example, by reducing its incoming capability from 7 Mbps to 1 Mbps."

"However, according to providers we spoke with, such reductions could violate the agreed-upon levels of services for which customers have paid," GAO points out.

And that is even before any new regulations that specifically would outlaw packet shaping that could, for example, limit video streaming, gaming, and peer-to-peer and other bandwidth-intensive applications during daytime work hours, when teleworkers will have an arguably greater need to maintain functioning connections for voice and data operations essential to their work.

Overly-casual positioning of the need for "packet equality" rules can be dangerous, as the GAO points out.

Some Problems Do Not Go Away, Even if They Become Less Important

To get funding, any advocacy group must first demonstrate that a problem exists. To keep getting funds, an entity has to insist no progress is being made, necessitating continued funding. And if the original problem actually is solved, the entity has to find some new problem that needs to be solved. 

All that applies to “broadband access,” no less than any other undertaking. Despite much data indicating that internet access (mobile and fixed). One analysis by Fastly suggests that even the most-challenged digital subscriber line networks in the United States held up under the new at-home load. Cable TV networks also have held up well.

According to Ookla, U.S. internet access speeds  on fixed networks dipped about four percent during the pandemic. Mobile speeds actually improved by one percent. 

)has held up very well as nationwide stay-at-home policies were put into place because of the Covid pandemic, not every community was so fortunate. Oxnard, Calif., for example, was one such place, seeing a dip in downstream speeds of about 20 percent from mid-March to mid-April, although performance now is moving back up post-mid-April, according to BroadbandNow, using test data from M-Lab. 

Most of you are familiar with speed tests. Most of you also know you test your connections primarily when they seem “slow.” Almost nobody bothers to test when the networks are humming along. And M-Lab tests have increased significantly during the stay-at-home policies, suggesting customers are aware of greater congestion or slower experienced speeds. That would hardly be surprising, as all studies show at-home internet access data volume has grown 40 percent or so as people have been forced to work and learn at home. 

A study by Fastly indicates speed and income are related. That should not be surprising. Lots of consumer behaviors and spending patterns are correlated with income, education, wealth and geography. Up to 20 percent of U.S. consumers also say they rely on mobile internet access, and do not buy fixed network access. Rural speeds tend to be slower than urban speeds. Rural use of the internet, PC ownership and income also seem to be lower than in urban areas. 

The point is that there always will be room to argue that a digital divide continues to exist, even if it is narrowing and has been narrowing for a couple of decades. And statistics often too-casually dismiss the many nuances as speeds are improving fast. 

But differences might always exist.  Since networks are expensive, the last two percent of locations will always be an economic issue.

Consumer Spending on Connectivity Might Surprise You, Even in Recession

It is easy enough to predict that consumer, smaller business and enterprise spending will fall if the world falls into recession in 2020. That would be in line with findings that consumption and consumer spending fell virtually across the board in the Great Recession.  

But that does not directly translate into consumer, small business and enterprise spending on communication services and products. 

Telecom service provider revenues did not change much in the wake of the Great Recession of 2008. In fact, according to some studies, U.S. consumer spending on communications actually grew, overall, in the wake of the Great Recession, for example. 

Some surveys found that device purchases slowed during the Great Recession. But some surveys also found consumers willing to make other tradeoffs to keep their broadband, mobile and video subscription services. There was, in other words,  less willingness to cut high speed access than other services, for example.

In fact, some surveys found consumers would rather abandon their mobile service than give up fixed high speed access. Consumers have indicated they would give up other products as well to keep their broadband access.

If they had to give up one service  (video entertainment, mobile, broadband), U.K. consumers would ditch video (49 percent) or mobile (30 percent) before their fixed network broadband connection (two percent), a survey of  more than 10,000 U.K. consumers found, for example.

The point is that high speed access arguably is highly resilient in a recession, and arguably the most-valued service, perhaps even be more valued than mobility. But mobility likely would rank as among the next most important service.

By some studies, consumer spending on mobile devices increased during the Great Recession of 2008 and spending also increased for communication services. That pattern hasn’t changed.

It does not seem that there was much recession impact on subscription video entertainment spending, though some consumers might have dropped a premium channel in favor of expanded basic service.

So despite fears, it is likely that overall revenue will not change that much in the wake of the expected Covid-19 recessions, either. 

One reason is that consumer spending on communications is relatively fixed. As data gathered by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development suggest, developed nation spending by consumers was remarkably consistent in the few years after the 2008 recession. 

source: OECD

Still, operators will be prudent, given growing expectations that the global economy now appears headed for negative growth in 2020 because of the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit. 

Three years after the 2008 Great Recession, many still were noting reduced revenue growth in some regions. The caveat is that those areas arguably also had secular revenue issues that might have been masked by the effects of the Great Recession. It is likely that revenue trends were shaped by both consumer and enterprise spending, arguably benign in the former case, but more pronounced in the enterprise customer segment. 

Growth Forecasts, G20 countries in 2020
Real GDP growth (% in 2020)	Real GDP growth (% in 2020)	Previous forecast (before outbreak)
Argentina	-6.7	-2
Australia	-0.4	2
Brazil	-5.5	2.4
Canada	-1.3	1.8
China	1	5.9
France	-5	1
Germany	-6.8	0.9
India (2020/21 fiscal year)	2.1	6
Indonesia	1	5.1
Italy	-7	0.4
Japan	-1.5	0.4
South Korea	-1.8	2.2
Mexico	-5.4	1.1
Russia	-2	1.6
Saudi Arabia	-5	1
South Africa	-3	1.4
Turkey	-3	3.8
UK	-5	1.1
US	-2.8	1.7
Global (market exchange rates)	-2.2	2.3

source: Economist Intelligence Unit

The last two big recessions of note happened in 2001 and 2008. The issue now is whether the recession caused by economic shutdown for health reasons because of Covid-19 is going to be better, the same or worse than the great recession of 2008 or the collapse of the internet bubble in 2001, for example. 

The “same as” or “worse than” scenarios would be multi-year, perhaps half-decade long events. 

In a 2014 analysis, EuroMonitor noted that “the speed of the recovery from the 2008 global financial crisis has been unusually slow,” compared to recoveries from previous recessions. In the U.S. market, for example, gross domestic product per person did not recover to 2007 levels until 2012, four years after the 2008 great recession. 

GDP Per Working Age Person in Advanced Economies since 2007

source: Euromonitor