Working From Home Hasn't Broken the Internet (wsj.com) 51
sixoh1 shared this story from the Wall Street Journal:
Home internet and wireless connectivity in the U.S. have largely withstood unprecedented demands as more Americans work and learn remotely. Broadband and wireless service providers say traffic has jumped in residential areas at times of the day when families would typically head to offices and schools. Still, that surge in usage hasn't yet resulted in widespread outages or unusually long service disruptions, industry executives and analysts say. That is because the biggest increases in usage are happening during normally fallow periods.
Some service providers have joked that internet usage during the pandemic doesn't compare to the Super Bowl or season finale of the popular HBO show "Game of Thrones" in terms of strain on their networks, Evan Swarztrauber, senior policy adviser to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said this week on a call hosted by consulting company Recon Analytics Inc.Broadband consumption during the hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m . has risen by more than 50% since January, according to broadband data company OpenVault, which measured connections in more than one million homes. Usage during the peak early-evening hours increased 20% as of March 25. OpenVault estimates that average data consumption per household in March will reach nearly 400 gigabytes, a nearly 11% increase over the previous monthly record in January....
Some carriers that use cells on wheels and aerial network-support drones after hurricanes or tornadoes are now deploying those resources to neighborhoods with heavy wireless-service usage and places where health-care facilities need additional connectivity. Several wireless carriers including Verizon, T-Mobile US Inc. and AT&T Inc. have been given temporary access to fresh spectrum over the past week to bolster network capacity.
While Netflix is lowering its video quality in Canada, the Journal reports Netflix isn't as worried about the EU: Netflix Vice President Dave Temkin, speaking on a videoconference hosted by the network analytics company Kentik, said his engineers took some upgrades originally planned for the holiday season near the end of 2020 and simply made them sooner. A European regulator earlier this month asked Netflix to shift all its videos to standard-definition to avoid taxing domestic networks. Mr. Temkin said Netflix managed to shave its bandwidth usage using less drastic measures. "None of it is actually melting down," he said.
And the article also has stats from America's ISPs and cellphone providers:
Some service providers have joked that internet usage during the pandemic doesn't compare to the Super Bowl or season finale of the popular HBO show "Game of Thrones" in terms of strain on their networks, Evan Swarztrauber, senior policy adviser to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said this week on a call hosted by consulting company Recon Analytics Inc.Broadband consumption during the hours of 9 a.m. to 5 p.m . has risen by more than 50% since January, according to broadband data company OpenVault, which measured connections in more than one million homes. Usage during the peak early-evening hours increased 20% as of March 25. OpenVault estimates that average data consumption per household in March will reach nearly 400 gigabytes, a nearly 11% increase over the previous monthly record in January....
Some carriers that use cells on wheels and aerial network-support drones after hurricanes or tornadoes are now deploying those resources to neighborhoods with heavy wireless-service usage and places where health-care facilities need additional connectivity. Several wireless carriers including Verizon, T-Mobile US Inc. and AT&T Inc. have been given temporary access to fresh spectrum over the past week to bolster network capacity.
While Netflix is lowering its video quality in Canada, the Journal reports Netflix isn't as worried about the EU: Netflix Vice President Dave Temkin, speaking on a videoconference hosted by the network analytics company Kentik, said his engineers took some upgrades originally planned for the holiday season near the end of 2020 and simply made them sooner. A European regulator earlier this month asked Netflix to shift all its videos to standard-definition to avoid taxing domestic networks. Mr. Temkin said Netflix managed to shave its bandwidth usage using less drastic measures. "None of it is actually melting down," he said.
And the article also has stats from America's ISPs and cellphone providers:
- AT&T said cellular-data traffic was almost flat, with more customers using their home wi-fi networks instead -- but voice phone calls increased as much as 44%.
- Charter saw increases in daytime network activity, but in most markets "levels remain well below capacity and typical peak evening usage."
- Comcast says its peak traffic increased 20%, but they're still running at 40% capacity.
School starts on Monday (Score:2)
Most schools will start remote learning on Monday morning. Would be interesting to see if that puts the extra load on the internet that still hasn't happened yet.
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kim kardashian (Score:3)
time to release the new Kardashian photo shoot.
Re: School starts on Monday (Score:2)
If anything, may lower bandwidth. YouTube viewing totaled 60GB over the last 7 days in our house. It was >50% of our total usage with my wife and I on Zoom and Hangout video conference calls 8-9 hrs a day.
A pic worth 1000 words. 4K video worth billions (Score:2)
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. That's true for bandwidth. Video is 24-60 pictures PER SECOND.
So we see where the bandwidth is being used. Analog broadcast quality video at 2Mbps is plenty for lectures and other school learning. In fact most educational videos are offered at 600 kbps (0.6 Mbps) and 1.5Mpbs. Netflix 4K is 16 Mbps. Which means you can provide video streams to 26 students by turning off ONE 4K Netflix stream.
Or, one hour of 4K is enough bandwidth for students to view 70,000
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Our kids started two weeks ago as did many (in parts of the US).
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Our kids started two weeks ago as did many (in parts of the US).
Our kids aren't bothering, because they found out it doesn't count anyway, at least per our laws.
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Our kids aren't bothering, because they found out it doesn't count anyway, at least per our laws.
That reveals more about you than it does about your kids.
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So what has happened so far, we see a pretty big spike at the 30 minute mark and then everything recovers in about 5 minutes.
I'm guessing teachers getting on video conference, in this case zoom, and then setup whatever is going on for the next 30 minutes.
A lot of the spike has largely gone away as they 'zoom' added extra capacity.
You might say I only have experience with zoom which is what we use for work and what the teachers that I know are using.
We were using the analogue dial in option to handle any ban
commercial real estate (Score:3)
Re:commercial real estate (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how many companies are going to see no drop in productivity and get rid of their offices after this is over?
Probably few, because people are feeling the social isolation. It's one thing if you could remote in to work and socialize in the evening, but right now people can't do that either. I'm fairly high on the introvert scale and yet I miss the social banter in the office, I've never felt this much like a cog in the wheel as now. And when I'm feeling this way I know that most people are worse off.
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Re: commercial real estate (Score:2)
It won't be up to the workers, the corps that survive are going to be shedding a lot of their balance sheets; leases are liabilities and the taste for long-term assets, and the loans they came from, will need to be dumped for stronger cash positions. I'm hoping you're right though as I'm more worried that the shift to work from home will continue and a lot of the things we make businesses do to accommodate their workers will become a thing of the past with the costs being offset to the "employees" while the
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I wonder how many companies are going to see no drop in productivity and get rid of their offices after this is over?
Probably few, because people are feeling the social isolation. It's one thing if you could remote in to work and socialize in the evening, but right now people can't do that either.
I agree with you : few companies will get rid of their offices; but many, many will allow part-time remote work, just to reduce their real estate needs (and thus costs). And this enough to drive the market for real estate down.
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None. Just think of how twitchy those middle managers must be getting. Think of their mental health!
And The Gouging? (Score:5, Insightful)
For years consumers have been told that throttling is necessary because bandwidth is precious and limited and/or it has been necessary to limit the actions of a few greedy users.
Yet here we are seeing unprecedented demand for consumer net access and the internet hasn't melted.
Obviously there are all sorts of reasons for this, but I rather think this puts the lie to prior claims around the need to impose throttling or usage caps. As the nation comes to grips with and hopefully defeats Covid-19 (with luck the vaccine won't be too far away), hopefully the FCC will be keeping a close eye on the providers to make sure that such limits are not sneakily re-imposed.
We now know why they are there: to allow the money-grabbing telco's gouge even more from their consumers. We also know that they're not needed.
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AT&T sent me a message saying they were giving me an additional 10Gb on my phone plan.
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VZW gave me 15.
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What are you talking about? The greatest increase for residential internet bandwidth is during times it was fairly idle. Early evening peak usage saw an average increase of 20% - that's it. If the system melts down under 20% above average peak load, that would be one fragile system which would melt down during major sporting events, election nights, or very popular streaming show releases. Your argument is similar to saying that expanding highways is completely unnecessary and a hoax on the taxpayer because
Use the net! (Score:2)
It’s the same Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
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What abougt running RDP over the VPN? I know that a lot of people in my company do that with their work desktops.
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There is more traffic on the backbone too, as traffic which would have normally stayed within a company (e.g. a developer checking out a large repo from a company server) is now going over the internet instead. There are also more virtual meetings happening, replacing face to face meetings in physical conference rooms. That said, majority of the additional demand is during less busy times. Also, the backbone has plenty of capacity, it's the last mile which has the most restrictions, however if your work-fro
Simplest explanation is often best (Score:3)
Working@home doesn't reduce internet use because:
Clearly, we're using the internet at work much more than our employers would like to believe.
Plus side? Perhaps efficiency won't dip as much as expected, after all.
Might actually reduce evening congestion (Score:1)
Microsoft, Google, Netflix (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no shortage of Internet bandwidth and demand during the "day" is still far below the "normal" peak demand in the evening. Carriers size their networks bandwidth in order to meet the peak demand, which has not changed. What has happened is that more of the "underutilized capacity" is being utilized.
In other words, the pipe is sized to meet the peak demand when everyone fills the kettle or flushes the toilet during that commercial break during the stupid-bowl. The fact that the toilets are being flushed a few more times per hour during times OTHER THAN commercial breaks in the stupid-bowl does not have any impact on the need to size the water pipes to be able to meet the peak demand for simultaneous flushing and kettle filling.
The reason that Microsoft, Google, Netflix et al are reducing their bandwidth usage is because of poor planning. They are incapable of meeting the demand they have themselves created.
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Note that many companies fail to plan properly. The move all their eggs into one basket and then fail to provide adequate access to the new basket. When you have move your eggs from 400 distributed baskets into one central basket, you should expect that you will now require at the sum of all 400 basket paths to the one new centralized basket.
Many MBA's have been shocked by this realization.
Comcast - Data Caps (Score:1)
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Their bandwidth concerns are for the evening when everyone is streaming netflix. Daytime bandwidth is not their concern
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... so their line about data caps was all bunk?
Not "bunk", but greed. They need to find the money for all those unjustified C-level bonuses somewhere, don't they? Nobody operates a TCP/IP network at capacity, because that simply does not work. And since you get peaks, you want to have a lot of spare capacity and with that things degrade gracefully for a long stretch.
Of course it hasn't (Score:2)
All we've done is shift where the bandwidth is being used slightly.
It is the Internet (Score:3)
You know, it is designed to be resilient, quite unlike the fragile "just in time" and "just good enough for regular situations" solutions current "engineering" so often produces. And we are _very_ lucky to have it. My personal hope is that at least for a few decades people will remember that redundancy is the primary imperative for all reliable technology, some real stockpiling is critical for reliable supply chains, etc. Let us get away from "fair weather systems" that break immediately when the weather is not fair and let us stop to optimize revenue over all things. Instead, make survivability the primary concern and only then optimize profit. It may require us to put a lot of bean-counters and fundamentally greedy people against the wall (not literally), but it will make for a better future for everybody else.
Re: It is the Internet (Score:1)
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I agree completely agree. I usually include the MBAs in the "bean counter" class (i.e. all numbers no understanding), but you can list them separately, of course.
It has broken the (Azure) Cloud, though (Score:3)
We've not been able to bring up a new VM on Azure for over a week now - there's no capacity left in Europe, the UK, Africa, or basically anywhere except North America, East Asia and Australia. Latency and legal issues with those regions mean that Azure is basically frozen in much of the world - if you have a VM you can keep it but you can't resize it - not even to make it smaller.
Microsoft tell us that they're reserving capacity for essential services but they're also being careful not to publicise the problem. We don't want people thinking too hard about the fact that the cloud actually runs on real hardware that is not, in fact, any more elastic than the datacentre they got rid of when they moved to using someone else's computers, do we?
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The promise was that at scale, the cost of running a datacenter would be cheaper. The problem is that MS and co saw this as an opportunity to keep the cost of running it yourself about the same and then oversell capacity often at rates similar to low-end hosting companies and their $5 shared hosting packages back in the day with literally hundreds if not thousands of customers assigned to a single server.
Now that everyone needs the capacity they calculated and paid for, it's not there. During business hours
Playing from home has. (Score:2)
Working from home hasn't broken the internet, but everybody getting all of their entertainment online [i]after[/i] work definitely has, at least where I live. The internet is essentially unusable from 6PM to 12PM. Thank God for USENET and asynchronous downloading and viewing. Streaming is the worst.
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Make that 6PM to 12AM.
It still is going to happen... (Score:1)