With More People Streaming From Home, Is The Internet Holding Up?
As lockdowns are issued across the world due to the coronavirus pandemic, more people are working from home, attending virtual classrooms, playing games and streaming content. It has led to a surge in network traffic, but is it overwhelming the Internet?
This can probably be a lesson for understanding how the underlying infrastructure works. The good thing about the Internet is that it is highly decentralized by regions. The US, Canada and EU do not connect to the same networks, much like China has its own network. The common factor they all have is that they connect to a backbone network to the Internet. The burden of keeping Internet traffic moving is the responsibility of Internet Service Providers (ISP) and telco (telephone company) and cableco (cable company) operators. In many regions the ISP is also the telco and cableco, so there is plenty of integration.
The Internet has been capable of handling the capacity of the world’s data traffic. We are in the ZETTAbyte Era of the IoE Internet of Everything. Global Internet traffic is now at 1.2 ZB/year (A Zettabyte is 21 Zeros long) or 96 EB/month (An Exabyte is 18 Zeros long). Most traffic will be generated by OTT by over 71% by 2021, up by 19% from 2016 which was only 52%. With the recent spikes in network traffic that means even more traffic has been generated going into 2021 since the estimates did not take the pandemic into consideration.
What this tells us is that the infrastructure is capable of handling the increased capacity. It should not be a global but maybe a regional problem for some areas. These are ISP who do not have well maintained networks. People living in those regions will realize this during times of peak traffic load. The way to fix the problem is for the ISP to upgrade existing installations to higher bandwidth circuits supporting fiber-optic and broadband wireless connections. So the problem is not in the core of the network, but its periphery. It would be more localized rather than generalized.
Take for example a company that suddenly requires all workers to work from home using a VPN. If their network load was not designed for all workers connected remotely at the same time, there will be a bottleneck. When people from home start streaming from services like Disney+ or Netflix, the Internet provides the stream like water flowing down the river. However, it would be up to the streaming providers to optimize their traffic to the users. This was the reason many OTT providers (including Netflix) reduced the bit rate delivery to their subscribers, to maximize more bandwidth for everyone to use.
Content creators can also play a part in optimizing their content for faster delivery. Using a faster CODEC that are supported on streaming platforms can help. Coding formats like AV1 and HEVC can help content creators with videos that stream with more efficiency and quality. YouTube, a popular creators platform, has done its part to improve network traffic by reducing the video quality. This reduction means a lower bit rate, thus conserving more bandwidth for users and minimizing congestion. Many users will probably not even notice the quality, unless they are a serious techie.
The Internet won’t catastrophically crash, but the server you are connecting to might. The Internet is just the backbone where all data traffic flows. It is not one single network, but a collection of networks. It will still be accessible even if one segment goes down. It was by design the intention of the US DoD when they first commissioned the project that would become the Internet today. The Internet with its current backbone capacity of submarine cables using high-speed fiber-optic cables will further be boosted by GigabitInternet, low orbit satellites and 5G technology down the line. The telecom industry has always been prepared for more capacity and the exponential growth of devices connecting to the Internet with IPv6. The Internet will definitely be able to hold up. What is more important are the servers you connect to for work or streaming content also needs to hold up.
