You’re chilling on the couch watching a movie.
Sure you’ve seen it a million times before and you can recite lines along with the actors,
but it’s comforting and takes your mind off the problems of the world.
Right in the middle of the action packed car chase sequence your movie freezes.
The buffering icon for your streaming app pops up and you wait...and wait...just when
you’re about to restart, your movie kicks in again.
But now your once HD picture looks like an old video tape from the 80’s.
So you restart the streaming app.
That doesn’t work, so you try a more aggressive solution.
You unplug your modem and router.
You wait 30 seconds before plugging back in the modem.
It flashes orange...that’s bad, it means you can’t even connect to your network.
So you pull out your smartphone which uses a different cellular network and check your
home ISPs’ website.
There’s a widespread mass outage encompassing several regions; the company explains there’s
been unprecedented, sustained usage of services and it’s overloaded the broadband connections
to the internet in your area.
Though they claim to have technicians working hard to solve the issue, it’s clear they
have no idea when you’ll be able to get online again.
How likely is this scenario?
There are internet outages all the time, but what are the chances of a long term sustained
outage caused by the current unusually high amount of online activity?
While this video focuses mainly on problems that might crop up in the US, some of these
issues have already occurred, are ongoing or have the potential to occur in other countries.
Due to shelter in place orders caused by the covid-19 pandemic ISPs in many countries have
recently experienced a surge in traffic.
In Italy, Telecom Italia SpA noted that one local landline network saw 90% more traffic
in March than in February.
Key internet exchanges in various European cities such as Amsterdam, London, and Frankfurt
have seen a 10% to 20% percent spike in traffic since early March.
To answer the question could the whole internet break?
Chances are no.
Admittedly, the huge surge in usage means that the internet is undergoing a massive
stress test right now and no one completely knows exactly how it will be affected.
But the internet is made up of a countless number of independent networks worldwide which
often have redundancy baked into their infrastructures.
These networks exist on millions of computers which are controlled and maintained by a variety
of different people, organizations, businesses and governments.
It’s highly unlikely there will be a mass failure that affects the entire internet.
Don’t cheer yet--the caveat to that is there is a higher than normal possibility of mass
outages.
The internet will still be there, but your ability to access it may be affected.
Some US cities including Houston, New York City, San Diego, and San Jose have recently
seen slower average speeds overall due to spikes in use.
Our opening scenario assumes that you have relatively high speed internet access.
2019 statistics estimate that 4.5 billion people or 59% of the world’s population
actively use the internet.
A different 2019 study indicates that about 10% or some 33 million Americans don’t use
the internet.
For both sets of statistics, there are a variety of reasons why people don’t go online, but
far and away the number one reason would be lack of access which is often tied to poverty.
For some of these statistics tracking internet usage, there isn’t a lot of good data that
provides distinctions in those who do have access to the internet.
For example, of the 4.5 billion active internet users in the world how many have consistent,
stable access?
How many people access the internet via a single computer or smartphone that is shared
among multiple people in a household?
How many people only have access to the internet at work, school, a community center or a library?
For people who do have consistent, stable access to the internet, how fast is the speed
of their access?
Some parts of the US, often rural and low income areas have been grappling with these
issues for a while.
Consistent internet access is affected by poverty, but is also exacerbated by corporations
who have monopolies in various regions, and a government--at both the local and federal
level that has bowed to lobbyists and big business.
Perhaps you’ve even experienced a version of this yourself: your home internet access
is expensive, slow and frequently glitches.
Your friend who lives a block away, has faster internet, at a better price.
However, their ISP doesn’t service your area, although you live 5 minutes walking
distance apart.
The whole region where you both live is carved into seemingly arbitrary internet kingdoms
with little to no free market competition.
Often each internet kinggdom is ruled by a single company which controls access, speed
and cost.
Having low cost, high speed internet access for all citizens is vital.
We realize right now that there are far bigger issues at stake.
But we suggest that when things return to normal, you might want to take an interest
in how your city and the Federal Communication Commission [FCC] addresses issues of internet
access, speed, cost, the methodology used to map broadband penetration and competition
between ISPs.
Some areas have come up with solutions to address these types of issues.
For example, some school districts have taken to parking wi-fi enabled school buses in the
communities they serve so their students can have access to the internet to do homework.
Where possible, many communities have further intensified these types of work arounds due
to Covid-19 shelter in place orders.
Meanwhile also due to the pandemic, the FCC has asked telephone and internet companies
to sign a Keep Americans Connected Pledge.
The pledge includes opening wifi hotspots to everyone, agreeing to waive late fees and
not to terminate customers for 60 days due to Covid-19 related economic hardship.
Many companies have agreed to the pledge.
Furthermore, some internet companies have temporarily lifted data caps or offered promotional
pricing so that their customers can access the internet without worrying about data plans
or cost overages.
Rules vary so check with your individual company for information on how they are implementing
the pledge and any other pandemic related service they may be offering.
In mid March Netflix announced that they were reducing bit rates across all their streams
in Europe for 30 days with the goal of reducing their network traffic by 25%.
More recently, Netflix announced the same reduction for other countries including Israel
and India.
These measures are on top of the company’s normal use of an adaptive streaming tool that
automatically adjusts the quality of streaming video based on accessible bandwidth.
A few days after Netflix’s announcement, the European Union called on online video
companies to do their part in reducing bandwidth demand.
While no specific outage has yet been experienced, the government felt that it would be better
to take a proactive stance and have companies temporarily ease traffic rather than experience
major network disruptions.
Youtube quickly announced that it would begin to stream videos at standard definition [480p]
quality for users worldwide in an effort to ease internet traffic.
Users can still watch content at a higher quality setting, but clips will start out
in SD by default.
On a video you can click the gear icon, then select quality to manually adjust the setting.
Amazon, Facebook, Instagram and Apple also complied with the government request and have
put in place temporary measures of their own to reduce their video bit rates in Europe.
As planned, Disney+ launched throughout much of Europe on March 24th.
However, the company instituted procedures to temporarily lower the overall bandwidth
utilization of service by at least 25%.
At the request of the French government, Disney pushed back the launch of Disney+ in France
to April 7th.
Also the EU’s government and regulatory bodies authorized the telecom operators and
Internet service providers to apply exceptional measures, including the throttling of online
speeds, to prevent network congestion if needed.
Currently, no such known government requests for reduction in bandwidth or authorization
of telecoms and ISPs to throttle if necessary have happened in the US.
However it’s possible government mandates could be issued if networks begin to see major
or recurring outages.
If your internet goes out completely, it might not even be because of a mass surge in volume.
There are a number of external factors that can lead to an outage.
Common issues include extreme weather events or component failure due to age or destruction
from animals who like to chew up wires or build nests.
While these sorts of temporary outages occur frequently, due to the pandemic, the speed
at which the issue is fixed may be slower than normal and that could mean several days
of going without service for you.
If your internet is completely down due a mass surge in volume, what’s going on?
In general, the US infrastructure is generally accustomed to certain peaks of activity at
specific times of the day, such as in the evening when people return from work and get
online at home.
Over the last decade or so, the internet has generally improved in speed and become much
more reliable as connections evolved from dial-up modems to cable, satellite and fiber
optic.
Probably the weakest link is what are known as last-mile services, which are the cable
broadband and fiber-based broadband services that deliver the internet into homes.
These connections tend to provide a standard internet connection rather than the enterprise
level internet services available in offices and schools.
To give you a picture, most businesses and schools have big pipes to carry internet traffic,
compared with most homes using a garden hose.
Furthermore these garden hoses share a neighborhood node that may also face congestion.
ISPs use a number of modern network technologies to handle congestion in real time, often letting
them intelligently and automatically “deprioritize” the traffic of heavy users in overburdened
areas as needed.
Unfortunately, you’ll just have to sit tight if your service goes down.
ISPs are very aware of the spikes in activity.
Many are increasing capacity on their networks as needed, with potential to upgrade networks
and add emergency roll-in cell towers that are used to keep people online during natural
disasters.
There is a chance your internet could be limited or go down deliberately as the world deals
with the covid-19 pandemic.
Many hackers, trolls and online theft rings are using this disaster as an opportunity
to be malicious or to try to steal or ransom sensitive company information which may be
more vulnerable than usual as many employees are currently working from home.
Various cyber security attacks may result in temporarily causing particular websites
to go down and internet congestion or outages.
Over the last several weeks, cyber security incidents targeting the world health organization
[WHO] and their partners have skyrocketed.
In mid March a group of elite hackers activated a malicious site mimicking the WHO’s internal
email system in an attempt to steal passwords from staffers.
Thankfully, the attack was foiled.
Finally, you may deliberately lose access to the internet based on the whims of authorities
or a particular company.
To be clear, we would like to point out that this threat always exists, but in times of
social change or upheaval this threat is higher.
In 2016, the UN declared internet access to be a human right, but some countries such
as China, Russia and Iran throttle, or block certain apps and websites if they aren’t
to the regimes’ liking.
Last year, internet services were deliberately shut down more than 200 times in 33 separate
countries.
It happens less in non authoritarian countries, but it still happens.
In April 2019, the British Transport Police shut down the wi-fi on London's Tube network
during a protest by climate change activists Extinction Rebellion.
While the threat of a complete internet shut down isn’t high in the US, never say never.
However, what is more likely is that an internet company censors particular websites and apps.
America is still wrestling with net neutrality.
It isn't too impossible to believe that in a time of great social unrest, some companies
could seek to further their agenda or under pressure from the government limit access
to certain websites deemed undesirable.
Now that you've reached the end of our video, why not keep the watch party going?!