COVID-19 pandemic highlights critical nature of home networks

The COVID-19 pandemic’s emergence and exponential spread has highlighted the mission-critical nature of residential networks. Home networks are now lifelines, connecting us to colleagues, customers, co-workers, patients and investors, not to mention friends, family and entertainment. Many more people would be unemployed or be contributing less to the economy if not for this connectivity. Data shows that demand for downlink bandwidth in areas affected by the pandemic have risen on average by 30% and uplink bandwidths by 50%-100%. Those increases may not yet have peaked.  Such increased demand creates unexpected contention issues, which might be evident in metallic-sounding voice distortion in video-conferences, lost connections or interrupted streaming. Meeting this increased demand will require internet service providers (e.g., large and smaller phone and cable companies), application providers (e.g., smartphone companies, social media companies, financial institutions, health care providers, teleconferencing companies, distance learning companies and other) and the entire industry to work together to make consumer applications work seamlessly.

No longer should an internet service provider, phone or cable company or application provider blame a customer problem on another company. Telephone/cable companies and application providers cannot, even accidentally, disadvantage competitive application providers by leveraging the connection-data that they have but may not want to share because that may compete with their own desire to offer applications.

[John Cioffi conducted the pioneering research to create Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology, bringing broadband internet to millions of consumers and businesses globally.]

As the internet becomes our economic, educational and social window to the world, six innovators that built this critical technology give their thoughts on our post-pandemic future. These visionaries are part of the Marconi Society, a foundation that inspires and connects those creating new technology for a digitally inclusive world.