By Lynn Greiner
BEFORE THE COVID-19 crisis, people accessed the internet using multiple technologies: mobile, home Wi-Fi, public Wi-Fi, fixed infrastructure – and across multiple networks. Now, access diversity has collapsed, reflecting the fact there’s virtually no education or enterprise traffic, as so much of it has gone home.
With so many people carrying on with a laptop on the kitchen table, traffic on the internet looks so much different than it did just a couple of months ago and to see how different, Waterloo-based network intelligence solutions provider Sandvine compared the period of March 16-April 19, 2020 with the first half of 2019 to see how the pandemic is challenging global networks.
In fact, Cam Cullen, VP of global marketing at Sandvine, noted that for the first time in memory, we can look at the consumer broadband network and get a complete picture of the applications driving people’s usage. Usually, thanks to coverage gaps on enterprise and education networks, it’s not possible to see the full range of what is in use.
“So now, what we’ll be able to see – and this report is for the first time – really what happens when almost all traffic is concentrated on the single access network, so this is very interesting from a data perspective,” he noted during a Thursday webinar explaining the company’s data. “But for operators, it also helps you understand kind of how things are operating for your consumer base.”
One of the first things Sandvine saw, globally, was almost 40% traffic growth over the three month period between February 1 and April 19, 2020. Some operators, Cullen said, saw 100% growth. What saved them (although there was packet loss) was that the growth was during the day, using what had been excess capacity. And the usage dynamic changed as well, with lots of work from home activities such as virtual private networks and video conferencing through Webex, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and other such products used both by businesspeople and students. There was online fitness traffic, with Peloton reporting record activity. It was, he said, “a kind of constant background noise going on in the home.”
“The composition of traffic drastically increased and went very heavy on real time, high priority, high volume traffic, like gaming, and video and social networking,” he said.
“As that video conferencing and gaming and video is going on, if anyone has a bad experience, despite the fact that they know that the whole world is using the internet, they’re still checking to make sure that why their service isn’t delivering on them, so this is pretty important.” – Cam Cullen, Sandvine
To illustrate this, he highlighted a blog post from U.S. cable/ISP giant Comcast, which recorded a 32% increase in peak traffic and, interestingly, over 700,000 speed tests a day. “And if that doesn’t speak to you in terms of the importance of the quality that people are expecting, even during a time like this, nothing will,” he said. “Because as that video conferencing and gaming and video is going on, if anyone has a bad experience, despite the fact that they know that the whole world is using the internet, they’re still checking to make sure that why their service isn’t delivering on them, so this is pretty important.”
YouTube volume doubled as people in search of information on everything from news to recipes or how to make a mask piled on. Cullen noted this volume would have been even higher had YouTube, along with other video services including Netflix, not changed their default to standard definition during the pandemic. Netflix was the number two consumer of bandwidth, he said.
In fact, video used almost 60% of the bandwidth during the pandemic period, with social sharing a distant second. People also spent a lot of time searching for information on Google and WordPress (in blogs and online publications). Gaming downloads were so big that Microsoft and Sony reduced download rates for Xbox and PlayStation because some operators were complaining.
Twitter hit the top ten on mobile networks for the first time because, he said, it is the ideal social network for breaking news.
On satellite networks, which are mainly used for rural broadband now that airlines and cruise ships and other users are basically inactive, YouTube is number one (as it is on all networks) but satellite users did not generate much gaming traffic because there’s too much latency on those networks, said Cullen. Messaging, on the other hand, was the number two traffic generator.
The Sandvine report, which is a global one, explains: “This indicates that many of the rural broadband users have adopted WhatsApp as a primary messaging application as more reliable and reachable than traditional voice services. During the Covid-19 stay-at-home orders, WhatsApp has also served as a valuable video conferencing service, which drove up the consumption of WhatsApp in general, and on a limited bandwidth network like satellite, it allowed WhatsApp to rise in the charts.”
So what is the new normal?
“I think this is a challenge that all of the operators are dealing with,” Cullen said. “There are a lot of companies that have decided, ‘we don’t need to have offices anymore, we can work from home’, and there are educational institutions that said, ‘having students learn remotely is not so bad’. So I think we don’t know what the new normal will be, and we don’t know when it will happen. But I think there’s clearly going to be changes in consumer behavior as a result of this which have direct impact on the network behavior.
“And keep an eye for sure on what’s happening with video, gaming, and social. If you take those categories and combine them, they were almost 80% of the overall traffic, with everything else representing 20%. Those are the three applications that consumers are going to judge their experience by. Understanding the trends and how you’re delivering QoE is very important. What’s most important during a time like this is that everyone have access to bandwidth.”
To read the entire report, or to view the associated webinar, please click here.
