It's not just you. Internet around the world is slowing down due to increased traffic

Have you noticed something strange has been going on with the network lately? For example, my Wi-Fi regularly turns off, my favorite VPN has stopped working, and some sites take five seconds to open, or as a result do not contain images.

The governments of many countries have introduced quarantine and limited people's exit from home during the coronavirus. The result is a significant increase in Internet traffic on all fronts. People play games, video chat, watch TV series on video services, and even work. Network throughput has never been tested so globally. And now, as a result, the first bells begin to appear.

Zuckerberg, for example panicking, that they are “trying to at least not fall” on Facebook, because traffic to their platforms, including Instagram and WhatsApp, is breaking all historical records. Zoom and YouTube have also openly acknowledged congestion issues.

You may also have noticed some problems. The Zoom caller froze for a few seconds. For some reason, the video quality on YouTube, Twitch or Netflix seems worse than before. Global traffic, according to Cloudflare, has grown by 20% in just a month, and the infrastructure of some services is suffering more from this than others.

Is the network really slow?

A few tens of percent may seem very insignificant, but the fact is that there is no escape from them. This is not just one small service that received a “habra effect”, and the number of users increased by 5000% per day. The entire Internet is loaded. In Seattle, for example, where traffic was up 30% in March, even the slowest nighttime hours in March exceeded the daytime traffic peaks seen in January.

And many users feel this. Data loading speed, according to Ookla, decreased by 4,9% in the last week alone. Over the month, average download speeds fell 38% in San Jose and 24% in New York City, according to Broadband Now. Both cities are currently experiencing active spread of COVID-19.

Traffic in the US grew by an average of 23%

However, in the USA the average download speed on wired Internet is 140 Mbit/s, so for most users even “slow” Internet is sufficient. And the Internet is easily scalable an environment that is used to growing every year, albeit at a slower pace. About 80% of traffic is now video, and the biggest players like Google and Netflix have learned work with it in such a way as to avoid “traffic jams” in the system. They invested billions and built their own huge CDN-infrastructure to deliver content from servers directly and in large volumes. And this infrastructure, according to plans, takes into account the growth of traffic to their portals by 30-50% per year. This time the growth simply happened faster.

In Europe, according to Telefónica, Internet traffic has increased by 35% since the start of the pandemic. Traffic on online games and video conferencing doubled, and messages on WhatsApp began to be sent four times more often.

The Internet has replaced all other forms of activity for people. Cinema, restaurants, walks around the city, resorts. In Spain, its use is now sharply reduced to only once a day, at 8 pm, when people across the country go to their windows to clap and whistle doctors and other health service personnel. The whole country is clapping. And Internet services get a break for literally five minutes.

The network infrastructure should hierarchy. First-rank providers, the largest ISPs, manage large highways, including traffic between countries and continents. Second-tier companies, including most Russian Internet providers licensed by Roskomnadzor handle regional traffic. A third-rank ISP provides a specific wire to your home. In these “last kilometers”, as a rule, the problem arises. If the speed has become completely unbearable in the last week, most likely it is the users in your high-rise building who need to be blamed. Well, or old cables that were designed to carry a television signal into your home, and not take data packets from it for the global network.

Due to network congestion, latency may increase (how is your ping in your favorite game, by the way?). Some sites also begin to “think” for a very long time. Large companies like Amazon and Facebook have the ability to shift the load from server to server, redistribute traffic and scale resources if necessary. Small operators do not have such capabilities. If they were not prepared for a sharp increase in traffic in advance, the brakes can become very noticeable.

A slow dance

In order to somehow help local ISPs with traffic (and also quietly reduce their own costs, where would we be without this), large companies are taking active measures. Netflix, Apple, Amazon (Prime Video and Twitch), Google (YouTube) and Disney with its Disney+ have all lowered the video quality on their services.

For some of them, this is a necessary measure: they receive their profit from a monthly subscription. Its cost assumed a certain number of hours of viewing. And if previously in the USA, video streaming took no more than 4 hours in the evening on a weekday. Now the active period lasts 10 hours, 2,5 times longer. Here, either increase the cost of subscription (while unemployment is breaking records - they won’t understand you), or look for how to reduce costs by some means.

Children in Manchester do aerobics using YouTube

Steam breaks records by simultaneously playing users (7,25 million) and by active users (23,5 million with the PC client). Valve announced that it will stop automatically update games so as not to overload the network in the users' home. For games you haven't played in a while, the update will only launch during the next off-peak period.

Sony also recently saidthat it will begin slowing down PlayStation game downloads in Europe to cope with increased traffic. And Facebook has cut the quality of videos on Facebook Live (the growth of viewers on streams here has exceeded 50% since January), and made it easier to watch only the audio version if someone has a slow Internet connection.

Microsoft said Olga,, that its Teams platform for corporate messaging and video conferencing added 12 million new users in a week (+37,5%). Slack also reported a 40% increase in paid subscribers. But the quality in Microsoft Teams was not reduced, and now the service is According to Downdetector crashes literally every few days (although everything was stable for them back in February).

How did you feel something about yourself? Or is everything fine?

Source: habr.com