When traffic matters

So in times of Covid-19 you hear more and more people working from a so called home office. And the main concern of many people seems to be that the internet does not have the capacity to cover all these needs. You hear from companies like Netflix or Youtube, that they are reducing the quality of video’s to ensure that there are enough capabilities and that they do not overload the internet. But is that really an issue?

You may say that yes this is a concern. But honestly, the issue is often more difficult than simply saying, that the backbones may not be able to provide the necessary speed. It comes down to the following 3 things:

– Either it could be your land line / mobile provider (but here in Luxembourg it is not probable. Fiber is almost standard anywhere – Not for my home unfortunately)

– It could be that the backbones are reaching their capabilities (again Luxembourg is one of the best connected countries in Europe so not really probable)

– The Server Connection / land line of you company reaches its capabilities

And honestly, the most common issues, I am hearing in the last days, are problems you encounter inside your company / their connection! Most of the companies never had in mind to give access to almost any employee so the capacities were limited over there! If you connect over a secure connection like a VPN, often these devices have limited number of clients allowed , otherwise you pay additional licenses so that should be quiet easy to upgrade. But with more connections comes more traffic and this might be an issue. In most cases you could probably resolve that issue by simply paying for a faster line.

A combination of those 2 probably kept busy most of the technicians during the last days. Something you might not be able to upgrade as fast, was that you might have under dimensioned your hardware servers responsible for providing the necessary tools for people outside the company compound. And this is probably where you encounter the most issues these days. Either it is virtually scalable and if it’s not you might see the results quiet fast, or not…

The final thing you should consider with all these things in place and even if everything is well proportionate, is that it will take more time, than like you’re in the office network! It will always be like that, even if you’re using fiber! Encryption like VPN, distances and switches between your home and the office will always increase the delay! So your point of view that it is not working good, or less good than you are used to, is right. But keep in mind that a little more patience would be appropriate.

A final thought on the numbers and why those content providers are reducing their resolution… If you have a look at today’s charts of the LU-CIX Backbone statistics, you will see that on the 17.03.2020 we had much more traffic than today! So yes these measures of reducing quality probably helped but honestly, I think that most of the issues, users are running into are issues with their working place and nowhere else…

Images are from https://www.lu-cix.lu/ where you can find their daily statistics