I get that more kids being at home would cause an increase in usage, but would it be that drastic of an increase compared to say, over Christmas break, or spring break, or summer vacation?
But would having people working from home really be that drastic of an increase in internet traffic that it would slow the system down at a noticeable level? I just don’t see how connecting to office computers from home puts that intense of a load on the system.
I think it is different for several reasons.
First, just about everyone in the developed world is sitting at home right now. They are not at restaurants, bars, sporting events, shows, movie theaters, churches, or parties, on vacation, or hanging out at the malls, driving in their cars, going to coffee shops, talking (face to face) with friends or extended family, or doing any of the other aspects of daily life that persist during worldwide holidays. They are at home, probably on their home Internet's wifi, looking for something to watch, read, or do — and that doesn't include everyone trying to get their work done.
That brings us to the next point: with businesses shut down, last-mile, residential networks are shouldering almost the entire load of Internet traffic right now. In addition to the sharp increase of "traditional" residential traffic, they also now have to cope with an unprecedented deluge of video conferences and business-related file transfers. A lot of that traffic is normally distributed among corporate or business service providers, but now, it's all getting crammed through the residential pipes — all while the kids are home from school, streaming videos and downloading games. The "core" Internet infrastructure can handle it just fine, but the smaller, local networks were not really designed for this.
Cloudflare, a content delivery company which I use here for GTPlanet, has published some fascinating maps which illustrate this shift. Here is a map that shows how Internet traffic has changed in Houston, Texas.
The red areas show decreased Internet traffic, the green areas show increased traffic. Not surprisingly, the red areas are the downtown/business districts of Houston, and they are going to be served by commercial Internet providers that will have a pretty good idea of how much typical network capacity they need. Now, all of that is shifting to the residential networks in green.
You can find more city maps
here. It's interesting to see smaller red areas in the dense cities.
Finally, you have the services (and their servers) at the other end of the pipe which are struggling to keep up. Facebook, for example, is setting new active user records every single day, and Mark Zuckerberg has said they are just "trying to keep the lights on". Regardless of what you think about the company, Facebook is a modern marvel of web infrastructure and engineering, and for them to admit they are struggling like that says a lot. This isn't just a surge in traffic like what you see on the holidays or during something like the Super Bowl, it's a worldwide, simultaneous shift in human behavior.
Here is a good article which talks more about this. And yes, there has been a surge of traffic to GTPlanet as well.
(On an unrelated note, I haven't posted in this thread yet but just wanted to say thanks to all of you for participating in this thread. In such a scary time, it's comforting to me to see this community come together, and this thread has been one of the best sources of global news about the virus I have seen. Please keep sharing, and thank you for being here. Stay safe and healthy, guys!)
