With everyone staying at home and even working from home, the question that many people are asking is — will this outbreak cause internet outage?
The internet companies say the virus outbreak will not break the network and they are working hard to ensure there is no downtime.
Most broadband internet networks are built for worst case scenarios where in every household streams HD videos on multiple screens,does intense gaming and data transfer. So the current load due to people staying at home, working from home does not even come close to the worst-case peak data load. The internet is built to handle this.
The story is different if you depend on mobile networks to connect to the internet. This is the case for many poor countries and with nearly 4bn people depending on mobile networks to connect to the internet, the mobile networks are immensely clogged. With people staying at home, they are turning to phones for entertainment, to communicate and even to work during this period. With mobile networks loaded, three things are sure to happen — the calls are going to drop, the download speeds will be reduced and the temper is going to rise high.
Mobile operators and regulators are asking streaming services like Amazon, Netflix and Youtube to reduce the video quality in an attempt to reduce the data load. Many operators are requesting for broader spectrum during this time to cater to the data demands.
A lot of people are staying indoors and this is bad enough for — morale, business, individual health and countries economies. For those people to lose in addition to what is their only connection to the wider world, makes things even worse.
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