How COVID-19 has spun the internet out of control

The COVID-19 pandemic has placed a quarter of the world’s population under the lockdown and closed downed the shutters of offices. So, when millions of people are ideally sitting at their home with their smart gadgets or working from home, then this situation has spun the wheels of the internet usage as total data usage is surged by 50% to 70%. And, live streaming has jumped by 12% currently. Apart from this, a couple of other internet usage trends have surged –

• A total of +10% boost in the average data traffic can be seen.
• A new world record has been formed by over 9.1 Terabytes per second data consumption.
• Video conferencing traffic from portals like Skype, WebEx, Zoom, and others are increased by 50%.
• Increase of roughly 25% in the online and cloud gaming industry.

Coronavirus might have shattered the stock market, but internet usage has gone out of control with it. Even the word “Coronavirus” has been constantly trending on Google. Let’s give a look at the few online trends followed by the world amidst COVID-19.

Google’s Direct Efforts

It has been announced by the US President Donald Trump that Google was coming to rescue. The President further said in the press meet that the company is building a website to create awareness about the coronavirus test and help people understand when they should seek a test. Trump said that Google has added a staggering 1,700 engineers for the project.

However, later on, it was clarified that this project isn’t undertaken by the Google employees, but actually, it is a modest effort by Verily, the life science company. But, it not different than Google because both the companies are operating under the Alphabet corporate umbrella.

Telecom Technology Rush

Due to the COVID-19 lockdown, all the workplaces and educational institutions are shut down. This resulted in work from home and online studies. And, this leads to a makeshift increase in the utilization of video conferencing apps and tools. So, in this internet usage has been highly boosted, but in a good way.

The companies working in the field like Slack and Microsoft have made its cloud productivity suite available for free to the small businesses for the duration of the next six months. Even Google has followed the same steps by reducing the subscription rates for businesses. Moreover, the leading videoconferencing service provider – Zoom has lifted the restrictions from the free tier by allowing the convention to exceed the timeframe of 40 minutes.

Increased Entertainment Dosage

This pandemic may have canceled planned sporting events and musical activities, but that doesn’t mean there’s any shortage of entertainment. As the few stars such as Coldplay’s Chris Martin, John Legend, U2’s Bono, Yungblud and Christine & The Queens offering impromptu home concerts.

Still, we haven’t counted the online movies, music streaming and games data here. As per the thoughts of Maria Rua Aguete of Omdia, the tech research arm of Informa Tech, the online entertainment providers like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ are likely to contribute straight 12% in internet usage. Additionally, this will economically benefit the streaming services by roughly adding $175 billion in the revenue of 2020.

Collapse of Broadband

When the people are working from home, entertaining at home and browsing social media from home, this raises the fear of home broadband network collapsing. Especially in the UK as the ISPA has revealed that internet usage is at a peak in the evening when people stream Netflix shows and play online video games more than often. In fact, data demand is 10 times more during the evening.

This flare in internet usage is not the only problem in Europe because the internet data usage has increased worldwide. Cloudflare is the online infrastructure provider company that underpins the huge swathe of the internet has clearly indicated an increase in data usage. Even the chief executive Mathew Prince said that work from home has averagely increased 10% broadband usages nationwide. Just in Italy, internet traffic has spiked by 30%.

Taking the words of another internet expert into the consideration, Bayan Towfiq, the founder and CEO of Subspace – “The internet is getting overwhelmed.” This company works towards improving the low latency data delivery and they are facing a lot more trouble than the usual to improve the data bandwidth. The CEO shared concerns on the fact that people don’t notice while loading a web page or surfing on social media how much data a photo or video use it to load.

Conclusion

By analyzing all the different sides of the impact of coronavirus pandemic and how big companies are behaving today, we can clearly conclude that the internet is really burdened. Especially the home broadband networks as they have to bear the burden of corporate networks nowadays.

Thus, we are advising all our readers to avoid overwhelming their infrastructure and plan the utilization of their data carefully. That’s because if your network collapses today, then this will be another crisis for you. So, try to limit your leisure browsing and online streaming for a few days by using the power of the internet to address important issues only. Just show little restrictions while using the internet.