The Impact of Coronavirus on Networks.

As Governments impose quarantine regulations restricting movement and companies start telling employees they can work from home, the pressure on home networks will grow.

The network traffic congestion will occur where the internet speeds suddenly drop which is when they transition from the internet backbone to the residential and neighbourhood lower bandwidth cable, copper wire and fibre connections.

Overall traffic across both global and country networks will remain pretty constant. However, what will change is the patterns of traffic. Bottlenecks will emerge at network nodes where multiple lines join the core network. The DSLAM (Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer) is the network device that receives signals from multiple customer Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) connections and puts the signals on a high-speed backbone line using multiplexing techniques.

Video consumes 70% of network capacity and is made up of capacity hogging consumers such as Netflix, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram. Add to this the demand for Skype, WebEx and WhatsApp video conferencing used by work-at-home employees and the network will become strained. Typically patterns of traffic mean capacity usage is spread over the day and evening. However, those patterns will change when work-at-home employees are working at the same time as their children arrive home from school resulting in peak traffic demands.

The impact can be significant. Network congestion can result in increased latency, jitter and packet loss. Latency is the time it takes for data to get to its destination across the network. Excessive latency can result in time-outs in applications preventing secure logins. In military systems it can result in inaccurate targeting of a missile. In banking it can mean the buy or sell order being delayed. A millisecond of delay when trading in sums of tens of millions can result in huge losses, or reduced gains.

Other examples of latency include slow loading of web pages, session timeouts accessing the company ERP system, exceedingly long time to download a file someone sent you, emails taking longer to reach the recipient’s inbox, excessive time to load a shared screen on a conference call. These are all consequences of excessive latency.

Jitter is the fluctuation of latency over time. The impact is extremely noticeable when playing video games. You line up your shot, fire and it misses and the same happens again and again. Your ability to adjust to any latency is scuppered by the unpredictability that jitter causes. Likewise, it causes videos to become pixelated and difficult to watch.

Packet loss can be caused by a number of factors. One factor that has a great impact is network congestion. Packet loss can very quickly result in data throughput being reduced. It could result when transmitting a text file in losing part of the file.

To ensure your applications, videoconferencing, data backups etc. are performing the smart thing to do is emulate their performance over the network by mirroring the network which connects end-systems. This can be carried out using a WAN emulator to test the performance of your applications over a virtual network. The WAN emulator device is used to introduce highly accurate and controlled amounts of latency, jitter, packet loss and available bandwidth into a virtual network, that emulates the live environment, in a lab.

Once tested in a controlled environment against actual network conditions users can have confidence about performance across the live network. Adjustments can be made to applications so they can better handle network impairments, and the capacity of network links sized to handle traffic volumes.

Emulating networks with a network emulator lets you quickly benchmark, troubleshoot, and optimise performance testing of your mission-critical applications under the most challenging conditions.

Richard Page | CEO and Founder | Avizent Network Solutions - providers of the latest technology for emulating, testing, monitoring and securing networks.