Broadband networks in the U.S. and around the world held up well as countries locked down and work, school and play moved online in March. Anna-Maria Kovacs, a visiting scholar at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., took a brief look at worldwide Internet speed test data collected by Ookla and traffic data from Sandvine, and found that the crush of traffic put a temporary downward bend – and only that – on planetary network speeds…
It is not unusual, of course, for internet traffic to grow…What is unusual in the Covid–19 environment is the suddenness of the traffic growth. Rather than growing 30% in a year, traffic grew about that much in a month. Sandvine reports a “staggering increase in volume for network operators to cope with and absorb.” During March, according to Sandvine, global traffic grew 28.69% with an additional 9.28% during April, for a total of 38% over the two months. Upstream traffic growth was even more stunning, up 123.18% in March before leveling off…
The U.S. networks’ fixed-broadband speed bottomed out within three weeks, as did the global index, while the speeds of the EU, EU–4, and OECD continued to decline for another three weeks.
Kovacs’ conclusions – the apparent superior performance of U.S. networks is due to the beneficence of telecoms companies and the somnambulance of the Federal Communications Commission – are unsupported. Her top level observations might correlate to Ookla’s network traffic data, but she offers no analytical rigor or evidence of causation. The data sets she relies on aren’t necessarily globally consistent. For example, Ookla’s Speedtest.net is based in Seattle and relies on crowdsourced data. It’s a mistake to assume that the crowd generating the data in the U.S. is largely identical to the crowd in the E.U. It might or might not be.
Comparisons of the same population over a few weeks time are valid, though. The top line conclusion stands: globally, networks withstood the initial covid–19 induced surge, and adapted to higher traffic levels within a few weeks.
The Internet was originally designed to ride out a nuclear war. It works just fine in a pandemic, too.