COVID-19 changes the Internet

By Dr. Karl So, Doctorate of Business Administration

COVID-19 has been affecting everyone's lives around the world. Cities and countries had locked down, schools closed, limited access to offices, public gathering banned, all these reactions are lead to citizens staying at home and stop potential outbreaks. Indeed, that does not stop studying, working, and social entertaining. They just turn everything online and hit the Internet around the world.

During home staying, students are getting online classes from schools or universities, office meetings, and conferences on Zoom, Teams or Google meet, enjoying movies and TV on Netflix as entertainment. We have not been using the Internet that much as before, but now, you will lose your life if the internet goes down.

As an Internet application service provider, we have using our servers around the world to monitor the changes of the internet since the beginning of the year. It is an average 30% increase in Asia, a 50% increase in North America, and a 60% increase in Europe of internet use since February. We can see a spike of use when the local government announced actions to fight COVID-19, for example in Japan, school closures starting from 1st March and we can see there is a 30% increase in internet usage in that month. In the UK, country lockdown on 23rd March and we can see the internet usage raise 70% in one week. In New York, the state of emergency announced on 7th March and internet usage was up 50%.

While everyone is staying at home and using the Internet more than ever, does anyone think about the internet can handle such an increase in usage? Is COVID-19 going to break the internet too? The answer is NO, the internet is built-in elasticity that allows it to adapt to our needs, we are NOT going to break the internet. While we are work or learning from home and using video conferencing applications like Zoom, they are all using adaptive bitrate on the video transmission. When there is enough bandwidth, video quality is better, when the internet connection is getting tough, it will lower down the bitrate as the video quality is lower. Some online services may restrict the usage in some countries just to maintain the overall bandwidth. For example, France lockdown on March 17, Netflix, and YouTube also announced they will only providing standard definition quality video streaming rather than high definition.

Internet service providers around the world are also able to control the average speed of the internet to maintain certain Quality of Experience (QoE) for everyone. We can see there is an increase in Internet usage of 45% on the east coast in America but there is also an increase in internet speed for 2%, while the west coast has the same 45% increase in usage but a 10% down in speed. In the UK, there is a 75% increase in usage and a 30% decrease in speed, and in Japan, there is a 30% increase in usage and also 10% increase in speed.

Based on our analysis, we are quite sure the Internet is holding up even there is a different level increase in usage at a different time in a different part of the world. And again, COVID-19 will not be around forever, as long as we stay at home or our keeping social distance, we will be back to normal life so as the Internet.