Internet service providers and large tech companies like Netflix are working together to perhaps permanently strengthen internet connections in the face of increased usage due to the coronavirus pandemic, a new investigation from the MIT Technology Review claims.
The investigation begins by showing data about how the coronavirus pandemic has drastically increased internet usage. According to Cloudflare, recent internet activity has increased by around a quarter in many major cities as workers continue to shift from offices to homes.
Better than you’d expect, although you might not see it at home right away. Let’s start with some expected downturns.
“Anecdotally, the internet is struggling to keep up with the shift,” Matthew Roughan told the MIT Technology Review. A professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia, Roughan leads a mapping project called the Internet Topology Zoo. “You tend to hear bad news stories at the moment.”
However, and this is where news starts to pick up, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Paul Barford, who runs a similar project, told the publication that this local disruption doesn’t reflect the internet as a whole. “That’s the whole point of a distributed network,” he explained.
Meanwhile, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says that video service throttling isn’t a sign of degrading connection. Netflix and YouTube “Volunteering to do this in advance of any problem shows they’re good internet citizens,” he tells MIT Technology Review. The university publication states that these precautions are “just-in-case.”
“Equinox is in the middle of upgrading its traffic capacity from 10 to 100 gigabytes,” the university publication states. “The work was going to have been carried out over a year or two- but it is now being done in a few weeks.” Meanwhile, the article reports that Netflix vice president of network and systems infrastructure is now looking into installing hundreds of extra servers to supplement its usage in the second and third biggest hubs of each region where it operates, and Zoom is apparently “monitoring where most of its traffic comes from and partnering with broadband providers in those locations to set up dedicated connections.”
I couldn’t find precise data elsewhere to back these claims, though a recent article from Data Center Knowledge does refer to a Kentik webinar yesterday where Zoom and Netflix’s infrastructure leads each spoke candidly about how the two companies are approaching quarantine. Both companies’ representatives said that they were looking to get more servers into ISP locations, while also upping Equinox and AWS cloud bandwidth by allocating extra capacity to users. In particular, Zoom senior manager of SaaS operations Alex Guerrero reportedly explained that the company usually keeps 50 percent more capacity on its network than its actual maximum usage, meaning that it is well prepared for cloud expansion, while it is currently peering with ISPs in order to be “as close to the customer as possible.”
While Tom’s Hardware wasn’t on this call, it’s possible that this is where the MIT Technology Review is getting much of its information.
The MIT Technology Review's hope here is that, even after the pandemic subsides, these upgrades will remain. In that case, coronavirus will have spurred ISPs and other large netizens into action in a way that might not have happened otherwise.
“The internet was built for this,” Prince told the publication.
