Internet companies handled 'dramatic surge' during pandemic because of infrastructure investments, industry says

Comcast and its counterparts in the industry faced a surge of internet traffic in March and April, as other parts of the economy largely shut down. Employees began meeting on video conferencing platforms instead of at the office. Students and teachers moved to online as well. And while essential workers continued to report to their workplaces, nobody could go to a bar, movie or dinner afterward to unwind. Upstream traffic, meaning an output of data including video conferencing, increased during the day; downstream traffic, meaning streaming or downloading content, increased in the evening. “We were able to manage that, as most of the industry was, because we planned for significant overages,” said David Wittmann, vice president of cable marketing for Armstrong, an internet service provider in the Pittsburgh region. “I can tell you that our engineers worked tirelessly that first month augmenting our network where we saw areas of congestion. … They probably did as many augments in that month as they would in a year.”

A report by the San Francisco-based internet monitoring company ThousandEyes largely bolsters that claim, finding that while broadband interruptions spiked in some regions of North America post-pandemic, the outages likely occurred during non-business hours. Overall, the state of internet infrastructure is “healthy,” the report found. But some challenges were observed by the Center for Democracy, namely redistribution issues because of the “massive shift from using network connections in office buildings to using them at home.” “I think a lot of us found out exactly how many video conferences our home connections could support at one time, which for many was only one,” said Stan Adams, the organization’s deputy general counsel and open internet counsel. “While it can be difficult to determine whether a bandwidth limitation stems from the ISP’s [internet service provider] network, your own local network (WiFi), or the other end of your connection, I think we saw pretty clearly that many ISP networks are not capable of providing the marketed speeds and throughput to every subscriber simultaneously.” He said, “For me, it's tough to talk about ISPs meeting the needs of the communities they serve without talking about all those folks who remain unconnected, either because they cannot afford a connection or there are none available where they live. So while it's important that existing customers receive the service they pay for, whether the performance of their connection lives up to expectations comes second to whether someone has access to the internet at all.”