The performance of the Internet during COVID-19 lock-down

These days, many ISP’s internet service providers have too much traffic on their networks. This is another side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic, the lockdown of the global and a necessary stress test for network resilience.

The preliminary information which was provided by Ookla company, the main average download speed was decreased to less than 60Mbps, and the latency (the delay) reached 30ms and 50ms on fixed and mobile networks, respectively.

Digital content consumption has risen dramatically as people are forced to stay in their homes as almost the entire country is closed to contain the lethal spread of COVID-19.

Increased smart work at home, but mainly distribution of video content due to multiple video conferencing for the main jobs, forced some companies like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video to reduce the quality, and hence the necessary bandwidth, to relieve the pressure on the communication infrastructure.

Some service providers try to increase their core to core network capacity to 10 Gbps or even 100 Gbps but, as analyzed in some cases we deal directly with, this requires a new investment in hardware and infrastructure and a multi-week plan to implement due to the situation.

Fortunately, in most of these cases, it was possible to increase the capacity by implementing co-multiplexing and increasing the bandwidth based on the general multiplexing technology used.

Internet companies should use a new approach to transfer information in new ways to make the most of the Internet without delay for the subscriber and a substantial impact on video and audio services. This should be done as soon as possible to reduce the Internet services delay for the subscriber and cause significant financial losses.