Social Distancing and the Internet: What Can Network Performance Measurements Tell Us?

The COVID-19 pandemic and related restrictions forced many to work, learn, and socialize from home over the internet. There appears to be consensus that internet infrastructure in the developed world handled the resulting traffic surge well. In this paper, we study network measurement data collected by the Federal Communications Commission's Measuring Broadband America program before and during the pandemic in the United States (US). We analyze the data to understand the impact of lockdown orders on the performance of fixed broadband internet infrastructure across the US, and also attempt to correlate internet usage patterns with the changing behavior of users during lockdown. We found the key metrics such as change in data usage to be generally consistent with the literature. Through additional analysis, we found differences between metro and rural areas, changes in weekday, weekend, and hourly internet usage patterns, and indications of network congestion for some users.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
11/01/2020

Characterizing Service Provider Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in dramatic changes to the daily habi...
research
10/27/2021

An awareness-based model to minimize the environmental damage of the internet usage: A Longitudinal Study

The record-breaking increase of internet usage in 2020 with the spread o...
research
11/29/2020

Dank or Not? – Analyzing and Predicting the Popularity of Memes on Reddit

Internet memes have become an increasingly pervasive form of contemporar...
research
04/25/2020

Internet-human infrastructures: Lessons from Havana's StreetNet

We propose a mixed-methods approach to understanding the human infrastru...
research
08/23/2022

Analyzing Trends in Tor

The Tor Network has been a significant part of the Internet for years. T...
research
11/06/2021

NSF Broadband Research 2020 Report

The internet has become a critical communications infrastructure, and ac...
research
05/05/2021

Estimating the Impact of BGP Prefix Hijacking

BGP prefix hijacking is a critical threat to the resilience and security...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset