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The Internet

Recent Changes in Internet Traffic (cloudflare.com) 40

Louis Poinsignon of Cloudflare, sharing findings in a blog post: As the COVID-19 emergency continues and an increasing number of cities and countries are establishing quarantines or cordons sanitaire, the Internet has become, for many, the primary method to keep in touch with their friends and families. And it's a vital motor of the global economy as many companies have employees who are now working from home. Traffic towards video conferencing, streaming services and news, e-commerce websites has surged. We've seen growth in traffic from residential broadband networks, and a slowing of traffic from businesses and universities.

The Cloudflare team is fully operational and the Network Operating Center (NOC) is watching the changing traffic patterns in the more than 200 cities in which we operate hardware. Big changes in Internet traffic aren't unusual. They often occur around large sporting events like the Olympics or World Cup, cultural events like the Eurovision Song Contest and even during Ramadan at the breaking of the fast each day. The Internet was built to cope with an ever changing environment. In fact, it was literally created, tested, debugged and designed to deal with changing load patterns. Over the last few weeks, the Cloudflare Network team has noticed some new patterns and we wanted to share a few of them with you.

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Recent Changes in Internet Traffic

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  • Oh boy, yummy spam from King Amazon.

    • by onepoint ( 301486 ) on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @03:10PM (#59845462) Homepage Journal

      Funny that you say that.

      My spam filter's are almost empty. there is nothing in them comparison to the past
      where as I would get 700 in a day
      it's now 70 to 150 ( more like 90 )

      so has something changed in the last 3 weeks in the way google and others stop everyone?

      • I get 3-5 spam per day, same as for the past few years.

      • Might be a fluke. Mine is up from about 35 a day, to 70.

        • i got 6 days of data to show something is off,
          I am at odds, maybe a bunch of spammers caught the virus???

          • Microsoft took out a bunch of spammer systems recently. Maybe that's the reason your spam is down?
            • I recall them doing it more than once in the last 12 months
              last one I can think of was about december january ... has there been more?

      • by Megane ( 129182 )

        For a few years now, I eliminated almost all spam by turning on the zen.spamhaus.org RBL on my inbound SMTP, and rejecting mail by TLD (like .stream, .info, .top, 3rd-world countries, etc.), with just a couple of whitelist exceptions for some acquaintances who used .us addresses.

        Apparently the old-school spammers all dropped off in favor of people registering real (though lame) domain names to spam from. Only in the past few months have I gotten a run of 10 or so every week or so that weren't using lame do

        • Oh How I loved using Spamhaus back in the day. they were ( and still seems to be the best )
          I am no longer an ISP, sold that off almost 20 years ago.
          and I do long for old Bluefrog which was amazing.

          all my old email address have been routed and changed to new email address with google to help filter
          but I was able to back in the day go from 250K pieces of spam a day to less than 3K in a day.

          Now I keep working on reporting spam and hope that there are others at the helm fighting

          • by Megane ( 129182 )

            It helps a bit that this is my own personal inbound mail server (I've had static IP service since getting DSL on 2000-02-29), so I don't have to worry about users/customers getting crap from who knows where, so I probably have half the world blocked just by CCTLDs alone. I don't communicate with anyone from Brazil, for instance, so I shouldn't be seeing any mail with .br in the From: or envelope or reverse DNS. And while I don't have all of France blocked, wannado.fr is blocked because that reverse DNS is e

            • I bet SPF and a few other tools are working to make things better.
              Sadly, many things need to be tried and tested multiple times before
              it works correctly.
              slow journey to low spam.

  • Because I'm going to be working from there in a week or two. I suspect many people will be doing the same. This could be a lucrative time for the broadband ISP sector.
    • Most people should not need to do this. For most things 25 or 50mbps is plenty, even if sharing with family.

      Having said that, if your provider doesn't have 50 as the minimum something is wrong. The cheapest package for around here in FIOS town is actually the 200/200 level, provisioned at 300/300. I used to download tons of crap back when the lowest tier was 15/5 and honestly most of the time that was plenty fast. As long as you are above DSL levels most users will be fine.

      Of course everyone will tell
      • 50Mbps is sufficient for most things, if you can wait and know how to batch things and do traffic management. It's not if some things need to run in parallel without throttling or time isn't free.
        • 50Mbps in Bay Area here. Two teleworking adults. Dual VPN devices for both. Webex, Slack/Trello, G-Suite, occasional document/ISO transfers to office. Offspring are "online learning" with at least three devices (TV, tablet, desktop).

          No problems here.

      • Curious where "here" is. Out in the boonies of NH, I'm 10/3mbps on a good day, and often right around 5/2. Yay Charter Communications. FIOS doesn't run within 25 miles of my home, nor DSL. I think the only option I could even get at this point other than Charter involves satellite. Time Warner has most of NH, but not my area - no idea if it is better or worse.
        • by ledow ( 319597 )

          I'm near London and only was offered 4 down, 1 up... and I'm nowhere near being "rural" or anything like that.

          Ironically, my 4G phone got 85Mbps down and 20 up this morning. There's a reason that my Internet is a 4G router and not a landline.

    • Because I'm going to be working from there in a week or two. I suspect many people will be doing the same. This could be a lucrative time for the broadband ISP sector.

      Lucrative? Imagine you and 50 million other citizens all asking for bandwidth upgrades.

      I suspect many ISPs will soon be facing the same challenge as male porn stars; profit only comes to those who can keep it up.

    • They'll find a way to get a bailout as well.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Italian traffic up 20 to 40%. Pornhub has free premium membership for Italians. I wonder if there's any correlation there?
  • I can't even count how many times a page has failed to load, and a Cloudflare page has popped to let me know that they were involved. Cloudflare were also complicit in political censorship.

    Fly, PR monkeys, fly!
    • What did they censor exactly? Oh right, 8chan which was hosting links to extremists slaughtering civilians which then inspire more extremists to slaughter civilians. It seems like you are suggesting that they should be required to host this kind of content using their private service. So whose rights get trampled? Either the people posting the content have it removed against their will or the web host is forced to leave it up even if they don't agree with it - someone loses either way...
  • it sure looks like rrdtool was used for some of these charts, I wonder what else
  • Those French figures miss an important event.
    Some time around 20:00 local (19:00 UTC) on 14 March, massive restrictions were announced. All restaurants had to close, ski resorts had to close (an estimated 30 000 Brits had arrived in France that day to go skiing), I can't remember what the rest of the restrictions were. I was eating in a hotel restaurant in a ski resort, let's just say it was *big* news.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @04:04PM (#59845668)

    Be considerate in your Internet use. With many organizations now working from home, way more people are going to be on home Internet during prime time hours – and your local Internet infrastructure may not always be up to the task. While you don’t need to give up Netflix, try to keep downloads to sleeping hours when people are less likely to be accessing essential services and information on the web. Unfortunately, this is particularly important in rural and remote areas, where communities are already struggling with insufficient connectivity.

    • While you don’t need to give up Netflix,

      Uh, what do you think we should give up that would take more bandwidth than Netflix? How many ISOs do you think we are downloading?

    • by Evtim ( 1022085 )

      Well, what was that push to stream everything then, eh? Every time the bandwidth expands it is immediately taken by spammers and advertisers. With every passing year the service actually becomes worst. I live, by accident, in the most rapidly developing part of Amsterdam (NL). Since the banks and businesses popped up in the area the network coverage gets progressively worst. At home I get no signal anymore, even for calling. During rush hour (before the virus, when there were rush hours), if the train servi

  • by Tim the Gecko ( 745081 ) on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @06:28PM (#59846216)

    Residential and mobile internet connections are a lot further down the road to IPv6 than corporate networks. That's why Google stats [google.com] show a big swing between workdays (26% IPv6) and weekends (>30% IPv6). With more people working from home those workday dips are likely to get less deep.

    Why is there such a difference? Big companies like Facebook and Comcast are running up against the limitations of RFC1918 (private) IP space, and don't want to have NAT (network address translation) between different parts of the same company. Mobile providers don't want to buy big blocks of IPv4 space and their customers are fine with IPv4 translation to legacy networks, as long as their favorite apps work. Corporate networks have had IPv4 address space for ages (so no need to spend money on new addresses) and are generally happy with NAT to the outside world.

  • They now control ~90%+ . Too much. Liberty on the net can't be centralized in the hands of a company like that.

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