Experts Say the Internet Will Mostly Stay Online During Coronavirus Pandemic

As millions of Americans hunker down to slow the spread of COVID-19, U.S. broadband networks are seeing a significant spike in usage. While industry insiders say that the U.S. internet should be able to handle the strain overall, broadband availability, affordability, and slow speeds could still pose a serious problem for many housebound U.S. residents. From a report: In a blog post, Cloudflare noted that Seattle, ground zero for the U.S. coronavirus spread, has seen internet usage spike by some 40 percent. Key internet exchanges in cities like Amsterdam, London, and Frankfurt have seen a 10 to 20 percent spike in traffic since around March 9. ISPs use a number of modern network technologies to handle congestion in real time, often letting them intelligently and automatically "deprioritize" the traffic of heavy users in overloaded areas. Even then, the massive surge in usage will likely impact U.S. broadband speeds in the weeks and months to come, industry trackers say. Broadband Now, a company that tracks U.S. broadband availability and speed, told Motherboard that six of the biggest U.S. cities by population have seen little to no change in median speed test results from the past 11 weeks.

Hmm interesting...

[Narcocide]

... almost as though they've been maliciously over-billing in epic criminal proportions for decades.

Re:

[Narcocide]

You misunderstand my statement though, by misunderstanding the degree of proportion of the overbilling I'm accusing them of, because you see all this time the justification for the overbilling was the implied claim that the networks were already saturated, which they clearly aren't, and that the ISPs were out of money to spend on upgrades, which they provably weren't, and still got extra money from the government to fix anyway just in case, which they then spent on hookers and blow instead.

Throwing in there

Re:

[AHuxley]

Adsl like plan speeds protect the fast new network.

The "spike" at DE-CIX wasn't dramatic

[ffkom]

The biggest Internet exchange node, DE-CIX in Frankfurt, saw its traffic rising to 9 TBit/s, which is well below the 45 TBit/s capacity available there - despite the many in Germany and Europe as a whole now working from home, or staying home instead of other leisures. Unless you have a shitty provider with poor peering, there is really no reason to expect the Internet as a whole to be overloaded.

Re:

[ffkom]

Addendum: Charts if you like them available at: https://www.de-cix.net/en/loca... [de-cix.net]

Re:

[ffkom]

... and more numbers about peak traffic from other Internet exchange points in the world: https://www.pch.net/ixp/dir#!m... [pch.net]

Re: The "spike" at DE-CIX wasn't dramatic

[muffen]

There is no "the internet as a whole" in this context anyway, there is absolutely no chance that every person on earth will be unable to access anything on the internet at the same time. Of course some places will suffer slow downs (aka the /. effect), but "the internet as a whole" is not going down!

Re:

[ShanghaiBill]

The whole notion of the Internet "breaking" is absurd. Cables don't break when additional pulses are sent through them and routers don't explode when they drop packets.

Congestion is self-correcting. When latency gets worse, the people who care the least give up. People trying to watch a 4K movie will drop down to a lower resolution when they get too many buffering pauses, or they may just go do something else instead.

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[fazig]

Yeah, they could be starting to download terabytes of hundreds of games in their Steam libraries that they've never touched before. :)

In the case of streaming congestion would be self-correcting. But streaming isn't the entire internet.

The internet will most certainly not "break". But there could be issues coming up here an there where quality of service isn't as good as it used to be with high ping jitter. That could not only become a problem for gamers, but also for those who need a reliable ping for

Re:

[Retired ICS]

It is all self-correcting. And no one using the "Internet" need a reliable ping for video conferences. If they need video conferencing then they should have bought video conferencing and not have placed reliance on a "maybe it works, maybe it doesn't" network (the Internet) for non-entertainment purposes.

That said, I would expect that 99% of Internet congestion world-wide could be relieved by simply making the placement of gratuituous JavaScript in web pages an offense punishable by death, and making the

No Shit

[awwshit]

This is why they pay me the big bucks, so shit just works even when we push on it.

You idiots that can't figure out how to plug in your headset and adjust your audio are on your own. You can turn on the camera but I don't really want to see you.

How the internet works

[AHuxley]

A person who is smart and who has passed security tests has to drive to work.
Pass physical security to work.
Ensure everything is working.
Return home. Eat. Rest. Not get sick.
Slowly hardware and software at a physical location will need support due to years in use, more use and criminal attempts to enter a site.
A team and truck has to upgrade and replace hardware on site. The truck and staff have to get to the site.
Do criminals around the area think that truck on the way has a wuflu cure, food ..

but Ajit Pai told me

[cornfeedhobo]

That there is plenty of bandwidth in America. Could it be that he was ... Lying?!

Mostly harmless

[nospam007]

Is that virus then.

mostly

[CimmerianX]

'mostly' - Could we quantify 'mostly'?