OTT Providers Addressing Potential Network Slowdown Amidst A Pandemic
Due to the recent mitigation measures taken by governments across the world due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increase in working from home. To prevent the risk of virus infection, many companies have allowed their employees to telecommute to work. The closing of schools and most businesses in the hospitality and service industry is also leading to more people to stay home as part of the policy of social distancing. Out of work users, employees who work at home and students who need to access virtual classrooms will need to use the Internet.
This can have an impact on overall bandwidth. While many users connect to the Internet at their company, those systems use faster network connections to the Internet. They are often corporate accounts that purchase fast fiber-optic connections to a commercial Internet provider. With more users on the Internet from home, a system can get overwhelmed since it may not be able to handle the surge in traffic. The Internet backbone is made up of many networks that are run by telecom and cable companies. They were also upgraded to fiber-optic lines, but the majority of connections to households still use copper cable. The congestion will not necessarily be at the backbone itself, but more downstream toward the Internet Service Providers (ISP) network. This is where home users connect to for their Internet.
A major slowdown has not yet occurred due to increasing demand for data traffic. Instead, service providers will try to prevent this from happening by reducing high bandwidth traffic on the network in order to meet the demands on their capacity. This is starting to happen in the EU, with OTT streaming providers like Netflix, YouTube, Amazon Prime, Disney and Apple announcing that they will decrease their video quality to make more priority for network traffic. Now you might be wondering if you live in the EU, will this be good or bad? It was meant to prevent overloading on the network, but how much does quality suffer?
Netflix will be doing this for the next 30 days since it made their announcement. The quality will definitely suffer, since the bit rate will be reduced. The average user, who gets high definition streams, will also not get the usual quality. When the bit rate is reduced, the highest quality streaming content will not be available. What is even more confusing is that Netflix will continue to charge premium subscribers (who get 4K resolution) despite the lower bit rate (As of this posting. If the rates are reduced let me know in the comments below).
Premium subscribers get UHD 2160p resolution content. That requires a bit rate (minimum) of at least 35 Mbps for continuous streaming without lag or delays. Netflix, by lowering the bit rate, will affect the quality of faster streaming. Thus, premium subscribers could experience more delays, fragmenting, pixelations, color degradation and artifacts becoming noticeable at lower bit rates. For most subscribers, a 1 Mbps bit rate is not even acceptable for full HD 1080p resolution. The best quality you can really get at less than 3 Mbps is HD 720p quality for most content. Netflix claims that they will still get 4K content delivered, only at lower quality (that doesn’t quite sound right).
In order to reduce the bit rate, what Netflix engineers will do from their end is increase the compression rate making streaming much faster without consuming more bandwidth. For example, if Netflix were to reduce the bit rate for their content for standard subscribers to 1 Mbps, it lowers the quality but in terms of bandwidth it allows more users to stream simultaneously without congesting the network (on Netflix end). If normally the content had a bit rate of 7 Mbps for 1 user, reducing it to 1 Mbps allows another 6 more users or a total of 7 users. That way, Netflix will be able to handle the surge of more users without clogging their delivery network.
Netflix does have edge networks that use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) for speeding access. These use caching systems and their own servers to deliver content much faster based on regions. These are specialized devices called the Open Connect Appliance. These devices store copies of Netflix’s content replicated from the main server. Netflix uses partnerships to deploy the Open Connect devices. This is often with ISP in certain regions so that they can deliver content faster in a distributed manner, without relying on a central server. It can still be overwhelmed, and in this case the EU may only be able to handle as much traffic as is physically possible.
It seems this was also a request from Netflix partners, like the ISP, since the “stay home” orders will likely cause strains on their networks due to the streaming content traffic. If the traffic is overwhelming the networks in other regions, then Netflix will likely do the same in those areas. It is not slowing down of the network, but more reduction in quality to conserve bandwidth in order to allow more users and prevent congestion. While quality suffers, perhaps it is deemed necessary at the moment. Perhaps a credit can be given to premium subscribers who are not really getting the quality they are paying for.
