Internet providers feeling pressure as demand increases

As the virus continues to spread and cities begin to lockdown around the world, internet service providers (ISPs) are starting to see the same surge in traffic happen in their countries. The consequences are starting to become apparent. In the US, a report found a drop in the average download speed of several major cities, including New York, San Jose, San Diego, Phoenix, and Houston.

The report was released by BroadbandNow, a company specialised in tracking broadband speeds. Their report found that in most cities the drop in download speeds was minor. In New York City, for example, the average download speed dropped from the usual 73 megabits per second to 62 megabits per second — a 15% reduction.

Such a reduction will be inconvenient for some companies, but in most households, the 15% reduction will be imperceptible. The situation is similar in San Diego (dropped from 58Mbps to 48Mpbs), Houston (dropped from 53Mbps to 35MBps), and in Phoenix the average download speed is actually a little up, having raised from 40Mbps to 42Mbps.

One city, however, had its internet hit the hardest by the quarantine. San Jose’s broadband download speeds dropped from 65Mbps at the start of the year to just 35Mbps at the time of the report, a reduction of 46%.

In Europe, countries like Italy and Spain have experienced similar surges in their web traffic, which has prompted their governments to act in order to ensure the stability of their web infrastructures.

Right now, businesses have little choice but to trust that their governments and ISPs will keep the internet working normally. In the meantime, you can make sure your company’s tech tools continue running smoothly by working with professionals like HTL.London.

The current outlook

Across the US and Europe, internet providers, private companies and governments are all saying the same thing: our internet infrastructure is strong enough to withstand the current peak in demand.

As one official pointed out, traffic may have gone up, but the actual number of internet users did not increase dramatically. The traffic increase is due to the fact that people who used to spend their days at work using the internet for low-traffic tasks like emailing and browsing the web are now sitting at home, watching YouTube videos and Netflix all day, as well as engaging with remote work and study tasks that require streaming videos. Streaming deals with larger file sizes than your average email, making it inherently more taxing on the web’s infrastructure.

In Britain, for example, the peak in demand for streaming in households would last for about four hours on weekday evenings. Now, according to a local provider of streaming services, the peak in demand is lasting as much as 10 hours a day. This is a significant increase, but since the network was already designed to handle these peaks, the increase in peak duration is unlikely to bring down the web’s infrastructure.

However, just because the internet won’t stop working that does not mean that the world can’t experience a dramatic loss in speed and stability as more and more people start to be confined to their homes. In order to mitigate those effects, and answering a call made by the European parliament, a number of companies around the world have agreed to degrade their services and adopt new policies in order to reduce the volume of their web traffic during the pandemic. Companies that have implemented new measures include Netflix, YouTube, Microsoft and Disney.