Coronavirus outbreak forces companies and ISPs to upgrade.
Internet service providers and large tech companies like Netflix are working together to perhaps permanently strengthen internet connections in the face of increased usage due to the coronavirus pandemic, a new investigation from the MIT Technology Review claims.
The investigation begins by showing data about how the coronavirus pandemic has drastically increased internet usage.
According to Cloudflare, recent internet activity has increased by around a quarter in many major cities as workers continue to shift from offices to homes.
For both personal and business use, video calls are up, with more people uzing Zoom in the first two months of 2020 than all of 2019.
Home entertainment is also on the rise, with last weekend’s Steam player count rating 25% larger at 24 million consecutive players than the same weekend last month. Certain areas are impacted even harder, with Cloudflare showing a 40% usage increase in Italy specifically.
Companies like YouTube and Netflix are lowering video quality to preserve bandwidth, and video game companies like Valve and Sony are adjusting their updates to download when it’s not peak hours.
Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince says that video service throttling isn’t a sign of degrading connection. Netflix and YouTube "Volunteering to do this in advance of any problem shows they’re good internet citizens," he tells MIT Technology Review .
"Companies like Equinox and Netflix rushing out upgrades to their 200 global data centers, as well as Zoom’s recent partnerships with local broadband providers"writes the MIT Technology Review.
Equinox is in the middle of upgrading its traffic capacity from 10 to 100 gigabytes,the university publication states. The work was going to have been carried out over a year or two- but it is now being done in a few weeks.
The article reports that Netflix vice president of network and systems infrastructure is now looking into installing hundreds of extra servers to supplement its usage in the second and third biggest hubs of each region where it operates, and Zoom is apparently "monitoring where most of its traffic comes from and partnering with broadband providers in those locations to set up dedicated connections."
The MIT TechnologyReview's hope here is that, even after the pandemic subsides, these upgrades will remain. In that case, coronavirus will have spurred ISPs and other large netizens into action in a way that might not have happened otherwise.
No comments:
Post a Comment