Will Douglas Heaven* says that far from breaking it, the surge in usage the internet is seeing right now is driving a major upgrade.
Just like that, our internet connection has become an umbilical cord to the outside world.
We now depend on it to do our jobs, to go to school, and to see other people.
It is our primary source of entertainment.
And we’re using it a lot.
Between January and late March, internet traffic increased by around a quarter in many major cities, according to Cloudflare.
So how is the internet coping with the most sudden burst of usage in its history?
There are understandable signs of strain: Wi-Fi that slows to a crawl, websites that won’t load, video calls that cut out.
But despite the odd hiccup, the internet is doing just fine.
In fact, the COVID-19 crisis is driving the biggest expansion in years.
“Anecdotally, the internet is struggling to keep up with the shift,” says Matthew Roughan at the University of Adelaide, who leads a mapping project called the Internet Topology Zoo.
“You tend to hear the bad-news stories at the moment.”
Paul Barford at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who runs another internet-mapping project, agrees.
The more we use the internet, the more we notice its glitches.
Still, you might see brief, local disruption but not broader effects, he says: “That’s the whole point of a distributed network.”
As well as using the internet more overall, we are also using it at different times and in different places.
Cloudflare has data on where we’re connecting from.
It has produced maps that reveal how human activity has left city centres behind and decamped to the suburbs.
The sudden spike in demand is being taken seriously.
After being lobbied by Thierry Breton, the European Union’s Commissioner for Internet Markets, a raft of video-streaming companies all agreed to cut the picture quality of streamed video in Europe to avoid adding to the strain.
Video accounts for more than half the internet’s traffic, according to analysis by internet hardware firm Sandvine.
In addition to the increase in traffic, sheltering in place strains the internet in two more ways.
First, last-mile connections — the ones that run from local exchanges or data centres to your home — are typically the weakest links in a network.
Many run over outdated cables.
Home connections also tend to have lower bandwidth than those in an office or school, making familiar activities feel slower.
And the narrower pipes at the internet’s fringes get congested when everybody in a neighbourhood wants to use the internet at the same time.
A second issue is that internet companies are now having to handle traffic from multiple locations instead of a handful of hubs.
For example, it is easier for Dropbox to manage a thousand users when they are all connecting from a single university campus or office building.
All of that activity can be piped over a single high-speed connection.
Still, despite these niggles, the internet seems to be doing just fine.
Health checks from RIPE and Ookla, two organisations that monitor connection speeds around the world, show minor slowdowns but little change overall.
We may have an industrial revolution to thank.
Two decades ago, there was little commercial interest in the internet, which meant its infrastructure was managed in a relatively ad hoc way.
A one-off event, such as a major news announcement, could make everything crash, says Tesh Durvasula, CEO of CyrusOne, one of several international companies that help keep the internet running by installing and managing the vast clusters of computers that make up the cloud.
Now, a whole industry has sprung up and remade the internet for its own ends.
Telecom companies, content makers, retail giants, virtual storage providers plus a host of other data centres and cloud services have piped in new connections, shored up old ones, and wired up millions of superfast servers.
The investment has massively increased capacity, speed, and performance across the board.
“The industrialisation of the internet has created a powerful mesh of networks that is, for the most part, working beautifully,” says Durvasula.
Built with purpose
Just as massive investment in a city centre leads to a landscape transformed by construction projects, investment in the internet has led to similar expansion.
It is harder to see, but it has completely changed our online experience.
And it is why the internet is holding up so well right now.
In fact, far from bringing networks to their knees, COVID-19 is driving the most rapid expansion in years.
To make sure they meet demand, internet giants like Netflix and Equinix, which operates 200 data centres around the world, are rushing out upgrades as quickly as possible.
There are still a handful of stumbling blocks that could slow the upgrade.
For example, crucial parts of the internet still require a human touch.
There are always cables that need replacing or servers that need fixing, jobs that only human engineers can do.
For Barford, this could be where we start to see problems.
“If those people are no longer able to get out into the field, then there may be local outages that persist,” he says.
If supply chains break down, internet companies may also find it hard to get hold of equipment and hardware.
China is the largest producer of optical fibre and other essential hardware.
An interruption in supply could mean that plans to install new broadband connections to rural parts of the world are put on hold.
That could be bad for people in poorer regions who now find themselves cut off more than most.
But overall, the internet is emerging stronger than ever.
No other utility — not electricity, not water, not transportation — could handle such an increase in usage, says Cloudflare CEO, Matthew Prince: “The internet was built for this.”
* Will Douglas Heaven is Senior Editor for AI at MIT Technology Review.
This article first appeared at www.technologyreview.com.
