Caroline Delbert* says with most of the world now working from home, an increased need for speed could break the whole system.
As the world continues to work from home indefinitely because of the COVID-19 pandemic, can an increased demand for high-speed internet crash the whole system?
While it’s true the amount of internet bandwidth in the world technically is finite, any breakdowns will be at the local and likely hardware level, not in the shared entire amount of internet itself.
Where the internet comes from
Today, you’re likely using WiFi if you’re reading this at home.
But large offices are often still hardwired with ethernet cables, which can make setting up a large network a lot easier when people are using static desktop computers.
All the hardware in that kind of workstation is probably logged by its individual MAC address, and that can also be attached to an IP address based on your ethernet ports.
Organisations already use a tonne of bandwidth, and they pay more for it, the same way business flyers account for up to 75 per cent of airline profits despite being a small fraction of total passengers.
For a long time, business traffic unquestionably dominated, but then streaming services — not just Netflix and other similar platforms, but YouTube, too — rapidly closed the gap and moved ahead.
As more and increasingly better content is available to stream in high definition, people keep using up what’s available.
In 2016, Quartz reported video streaming amounted to 70 per cent of bandwidth at any given time.
On top of that, people stream music (YouTube accounts for 70 per cent of this, too), while gamers and other enthusiasts hang out on Twitch and similar services, and we continue to communicate on Facetime and Skype.
So, we’re using much more streaming than ever, and that number only continues to climb.
All this bandwidth is carried around by networks of fibre optic cables, which are to internet bandwidth what giant power lines are to the electrical grid.
Huge, concentrated amounts travel over these “trunk” lines and then branch into the smaller sections of our cities and then our neighbourhoods and homes.
And we’re fully linked around the world with the help of over 400 massive undersea cables that stretch for thousands of kilometres.
It’s easy to walk around with wireless devices and marvel at how internet seems to swirl in the air like a miasma, but everything we use is powered by an omnipresent overlay of wires and antennas that work the good, old-fashioned way even with space-age technology.
Like a theremin, this huge grid hums with increasing energy based on how close we are to it.
A coronavirus crash?
The move to working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic is the best public health decision people could have made.
But our new reality has led to many questions, like whether the sudden move to remote work will crash the internet.
This is where hardware comes into play.
Many workers from places with intranets and direct ethernet links to business-grade bandwidth still need the same complex tools and are now tapping into them remotely.
It’s this shift from corporate networks to consumer equipment where any breakdowns will occur, according to Harvard technology policy and computer science professor Jim Waldo.
“At Harvard, we have a fairly sophisticated network,” Waldo told the university’s Gazette.
“That keeps a lot of the traffic that is being sent from Harvard inside its network, where we know what the bandwidth constraints are.”
“Now that everybody is at home … it is going via a much more complicated route and a much more varied set of equipment, and that’s going to stress everything.”
Waldo says the internet’s ability to scale up and keep up is the real marvel here, and certainly people’s real usage has backed that up.
More importantly, as Waldo points out, the internet was made to cut corners and seamlessly cover errors.
If one domain server is out, your request goes to another.
Our data is passed back and forth in a container called a packet, and packet loss is part of what networks are designed to tolerate.
Even the idea of a packet is a way to minimise errors with clever design.
Streaming video is one of the most fault-tolerant, with long buffers and video-quality sliders that adjust automatically to your connection.
While much is being made of the announced bandwidth limiting of Netflix and other streaming services, the quality of life reduction won’t be much.
The overall idea of bandwidth isn’t threatened by an increase in users.
Instead, it’s what Waldo calls the last 100 yards: a reduction in places people usually use the internet, pushing them to instead rely on phones.
Workers are streaming meetings and pushing large files back and forth that would usually be on an intranet.
Capping Netflix for a month just puts more wiggle room in the hands of people whose less reliable networks might need it the most.
* Caroline Delbert is a writer, book editor and researcher. Her website is cdelbert.journoportfolio.com.
This article first appeared at www.popularmechanics.com/science.
