On March 30th, the European Union's telecoms regulatory agency (ORECE) said that no major Internet congestion problems had occurred since the start of the Covid-19 health crisis: "Network operators have been able to cope with this additional traffic load". While overall traffic on fixed and mobile networks has increased significantly, there has been no major downtime across Europe due to possible over-consumption of bandwidth, she explained.

The statement comes after worrying predictions by several experts that the Internet infrastructure may not be able to cope with the increase in traffic.

Although some Internet access problems were "observed and mitigated," they were deemed "local and temporary." No unusual incidents were observed by the agency, which also commended the telecom operators in some member countries for implementing specific measures.

In some EU Member States, the ORECE noted "a stabilisation of traffic", but also "a decrease in peak traffic". This decrease is attributed to "traffic reduction measures" put in place by "some of the largest CAPs", a term used to refer to Internet content and service providers.

Indeed, two weeks ago, the agency formally requested video streaming services to reduce the quality of service for European users in order to avoid overloading the EU's Internet architecture. The first to agree were Netflix and YouTube and have started to provide SD streams. Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Facebook responded later and also capped the quality of video streaming for the EU.

Although not approached by the ORECE officials, Akamai, Microsoft and Sony also slowed down game downloads during peak hours to avoid congesting the Internet infrastructure when a new game or update is released and deployed to millions of users.

Some experts, however, have publicly criticised the agency's call, castigating unnecessary panic. Several ISPs said that the Internet backbone had been specially designed for times like these and is therefore designed to handle sudden and very large volumes of traffic.

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Source : ZDNet

Of course, the international bandwidth is increasing, but this masks a rollercoaster evolution in recent years. This is at least what a study published on Wednesday by the Telegeography Research Institute found.
Indeed, according to this analysis, global Internet bandwidth increased last year by only 26%, the lowest annual growth rate in at least 15 years. Although the pace is slowing, international bandwidth has almost tripled compared to 2015.

A dynamism attributed, by Telegeography, largely to the African continent. With a compound annual growth rate of 45% between 2015 and 2019, it is the continent that has experienced the fastest growth. The Asian continent is not to be outdone, with its bandwidth volume reaching a compound annual rate of 42% over the same period.

"Since we started tracking international Internet capacity in 1999, the most efficient channel has always been between Europe, the United States and Canada. This route was overshadowed by the Latin American-US and Canadian route, which experienced an explosion in bandwidth," according to the research institute.

A paradigm shift due in particular to a better integration of the countries of the American bloc, "while Asia and Europe have a greater diversity of connectivity". The researchers also note that content providers have an increasingly important role to play as they now dominate the creation of the backbones of the global Internet through submarine cables. The latter connect the different Atlantic or Pacific coastal countries. In view of the latest transcontinental submarine cable projects, the evolution described by Telegeography does not seem likely to slow down.

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Source : Les Echos