Let’s Flatten The Curve, Together!

Disinformation is false information spread deliberately to deceive, Misinformation is misleading without intent or knowledge, Disinformation is a subset of Misinformation. The Infodemic of COVID-19 is spreading faster than the pandemic itself!

I hope you are all doing well, staying safe, taking care of your loved ones and peers, having fun “physically & virtually”, and doing your best in beating the spread of the Novel Corona Virus COVID-19.

As leaders, experts and individuals, we need to step up in spreading the real information whenever possible, do our best to flatten the curve #flattenthecurve

After reading many articles, talking to friends, colleagues, neighbours, clients & partners, I wanted to clarify a few things regarding internet usage and possible impact on the Internet due to COVID-19 outbreak.

From Teleworking to Homeschooling, will the surge on internet traffic break the Internet?

In very simple words, the internet consists of logical and physical resources, that consist of systems, nodes, links, software, protocols, etc... In many shapes, forms, versions and types... all of these are spread all over the globe.

If the word “break” means total-shutdown or major disconnects on the internet globally leading to a very fragmented set of networks, then the answer is No, this is inconceivable or very unlikely to happen given all indications we have now. I would argue a global cut on Electricity supplies or global Cyberattack is more likely to cause such a shutdown.

But if the word “break” means there will be some constraints on some parts of the Internet leading to network outages Or slowness in a region, city or neighbourhood in a given geography, the simple answer is yes, that is possible, in fact, this happened before COVID-19 outbreak due to some events demand on the network spiked up. But it was limited to certain region/area and mostly the services were restored in a short time, however, now we may see more of those outages, network issues, hopefully in the short-run only.

Taking a closer look, the number of people working from home, students on home-schooling, restricting outdoor activities, closed-down restaurants turning into online menus –– Not mentioning the surge on Entertainment and Media. all of that has increased the demand on the Internet and re-shaped the peak hours for residential internet services (which was usually in the evening before the virus outbreak) over the last few days/weeks.

Ideally, we need to look at traffic statistics from:

1. Carriers and Mobile Operators
2. Content Providers and Cloud (Public/Private) Providers
3. Internet Exchanges.

Since the latter is very easy to obtain, I had a quick look on few Internet Exchanges, did talk with old colleagues, friends and partners –– Indeed they see a surge on traffic as you can see in the following graphs:

The graphs show the monthly statistics and we can see the traffic increased during the last few weeks on all exchanges at a higher pace than usual, worth to mention the last graph (HKIX – from Bottom Right side) shows the yearly statistics and we can also see a clear increase (higher than usual) over the last few weeks/months too. While these spikes we see on the graphs may appear not so big, but in reality, it means a lot in terms of traffic increase, it is estimated about 40-60% more than what they expected in a normal situation.

Just be clear for those who may not have a background on this topic, it is normal and expected to see a traffic increase every week/month, Carriers work on these values to predict future network demand, and based on that they will dimension the network expansion and add adequate capacity in every part of the network to serve future needs, however, as I mentioned earlier the of increase we saw over last few weeks is much higher than expected.

Carriers, operators, and cloud providers, usually have enough built-in spare capacity on their networks to absorb any additional traffic or spike that is caused by events for a few hours or days. That is said, that spare capacity may not be able to cope with the volume of the traffic we are seeing today, next few weeks, certainly not if this surge continues for few months down the line, if this trend continues –– that's mainly due to the higher peaks of traffic they are seeing today than what they had forecasted initially a few weeks/months back, so, we may see network congestions and/or bottleneck on some few/more places on the network, having said, that does not include all carriers/operators, but at quite a few for now and more to come if the surge continues. 

It’s not all about the up/down speed of your home link

Congestion, service degradation on the residential broadband network can impact some business applications, not mentioning video, voice traffic. However, many factors contribute to these issues –– your home link speed and carriers/providers network capacity and architecture such as placement of network caching and interconnects to public/private clouds on residential networks, changes in traffic source and destination that impact the flows and paths "traffic Patterns", and interconnects to Internet Exchanges, to name few.  

To dive a little bit deeper, Carriers networks (Business, Residential, Mobile…) are segregated in general –– whether the design was a choice or inherited over the years due to organic growth or due to M&A, however, few carriers built a multi-purpose network (Unified/Single Network) that delivers all services. In most of the cases, there is a separation between business traffic and broadband traffic at the access layer (last mile where the carriers connect to the user) and sometimes the separation extends to upper aggregation layers as well, rarely in the backbone. This resulted in a few differences:

 1.    Resiliency and Reliability are not the same

2.    Network dimensioning and room to overcomes burstiness are different

3.    Interconnects to Content Delivery Networks and Network Caching are different

4.    Connections to Cloud players might be different due to the demand.

There are more factors to list but if we agree that these are the most impactful ones, we can see the reliability aspect is different where we speak about Best-effort reliability (connecting homes) Vs. high reliable connections (business connection), interconnects to public/private cloud and content providers are different. 

If this surge will continue then we will see challenges when it comes to the current overbooking and traffic patterns, simply these networks were not built to sustain such a situation, where we see an astronomical rise of traffic in both down and up direction.

We need to lower our overbooking or alternatively apply different architecture approaches to be fully scalable and ready in such situations.

It’s not only about Carriers and Operators

My 12 years old son is attending his classes remotely using Google virtual classrooms, it works very well, however, yesterday he couldn’t attend some of his classes as he was getting few errors messages, we didn’t have any issue with the internet link as I & my wife were working without any issues, but looks like there were some capacity issues. Most likely the issue was either at the carrier side or where they connect to Google cloud or at Google side, however, it was resolved after an hour. My colleague who is based in Barcelona mentioned the same thing happened to his kids (not same time)

I am wearing my old hat as a network engineer –– if we look closer to this, we can see the cloud providers have had also received a hit, the traffic demand increased on some of their services/networks and/or by the shift of traffic patterns, now and they are working on addressing that shift by adding more capacity on their services, networks, and interconnects to Carriers.      

Will the Current Residential Network become the Future Business+Residential Network?

Carriers, mobile operators, and cloud/content providers are working on addressing the new demand need as we speak, whether it is on the last mile or inside their networks or wherever might be needed. We can end-up strengthening the residential network to where it will have a full capability to support all types of demands when everyone is switched on.

After all, it's all about supply and demand, as many of us go back to offices in the next weeks-months, the situation of the network in the future might change back again. So the lesson is to ensure we have the capability to scale up and down as needed –– and make this situation an opportunity to exploit the best use of Teleworking, Homeschooling in the future, by doing that we will provide the need to have a more robust residential network.

Translating Challenges For Many Verticals

Over the past decade, if not more, I am used to working from the company office, at a Client/Partner offices, Teleworking from home/airport Or on a plane –– Never been a problem to me and the Firms I worked at. I imagine the same thing for many of you and your Firms.

However, there is a big number of firms across many Verticals/Industries that are not able to provide Teleworking to their employees where physical presence is not required. Many of these people can equally join us staying safe and working from home fully productive. My thoughts are with all those who have it harder than many of us.

Network security

Many VPN vendors reported a usage increase of almost 150% in this month, with more VPN usage across the organizations, more vulnerabilities are being found and targeted by malicious cyber actors as reported by some security organizations which requires organizations to enhance their VPNs. Any delay on this is likely to have a big impact organization. If we just put this as a hypothesis –– Many employees, leaders, experts and anyone who deals with any type of sensitive data to her/his company are working remotely today, so there will be more attacks –– The security aspect becomes more important than ever was. 

Staying Positive and Changing Our Behaviour

Behaviour change is needed more than ever, in fact, that's what few carriers asked (from Spain and a few other countries) their customer to do, where they asked to use the network moderately.

Everyone needs to do his/her best by changing habits from covering our coughs, washing our hands more-than-before, keeping social distancing –– To use the network efficiently and reasonably, allowing others and ourselves to stay connected, take our share on spreading the right information –– the all these measures will help us to protect ourselves and reduce the pandemic and infodemic in a way or another, the Behaviour Change is a must!

I see a tremendous opportunity to learn about our weaknesses due to this Global Pandemic and reshaping our future and the future for many generations to come –– whether it will be shaping the Internet we have today to become more robust and use best of it in the future, our global supply chain, healthcare systems, teleworking and distance-learning, you name it!

Many firms and leaders across the world acted reasonably and in a timely manner, they set an example, from carriers offering more data to accommodate the demand to technology firms & vendors offering free/new services to support our daily needs and governments offering stimulus to reduce the socio-economic impact from COVID-19 outbreak. 

 I would like to extend my thanks to Markus Berg and Sandeep Katiyar for the great discussion over the last few days on this topic.

Let’s flatten the curve #FlattenTheCurve together #togetherness