Big Thumbs Up to the Internet Infrastructure helping everyone going thru the COVID-19 pandemic
While California disagrees with Arizona on whether Golf is an ES(Essential Service) or not, I do want to thank all the great people keep all kinds of essential “lights” on while we still do not see a clear end of this pandemic, incl. food, water, electricity, natural gas AND Internet infrastructure!
I do think Internet backbone and service providers have had turned an A+ test result in the passed 1 month and a half shelter-in-place across the country! This is not because I work for high tech and lived in silicon valley, only because among all the above listed infrastructure level of essential services, Internet is the ONLY one has to face the significantly increased usage:
- Water: Drinking water should stay pretty similar level since people won’t drink more or less while they are at home or office. Industrial water usage should dropped quite a lot simply because lots of factories are closed.
- Electricity: Based on some report, it dropped at least by 15% mainly contributed by the drop of industrial usage.
- Gas: My guess is it also dropped because lots of restaurants shutdown or down scaled. Residential usage should go up, but not enough to fill the gap from restaurants and factories.
And look at Internet, based on below report from fastly.com, averagely across all developed countries, it went up by 40%+! And it’s very easy to connect the dots here — Zoom’s daily active user jumped from 10M to 200M, YouTube, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Disney+ should all see a hockey stick style jump of traffic simply because everyone are at home the whole week, month!
From the above list, there are two places (Japan and California) that are especially amazing since with 31% and 46% more traffic, its download speed even went up by 9.7%(Japan) and 1.2(California)! Quite unbelievable — tried my best to guess here:
- Japan: My guess is 2020 Tokyo Olympics related, although the event was pushed out by one year to 2021, I think they have completed the internet backbone upgrade and enhancement — which gave them ~10% download speed gain.
- California: The reason is Silicon Valley, although the millions servers may not in the golden state, while highly possible, the high tech giants may have enhanced their backbone investment to make sure their work from home engineers have great productivity.
Thank you all the Internet backbone operators and service providers to keep Internet functioning very well as the largest network connecting the whole world together!
