The Internet Will Help Society Survive the COVID-19 Pandemic

The Internet itself is being tested like never before. To understand how these challenges are testing, more than ever, both the Internet’s technical foundation and the society that relies on it, the Center for Data and Computing (CDAC) is launching a new initiative to deploy our expertise and collaborative relationships towards studying how this pandemic has affected the Internet network — how it is responding globally, and how well local communities are able to make use of it. We’re initiating projects to study the Internet’s response under crisis, based on an unprecedented coordination of data about network traffic load through granular measurements, proprietary data-sharing agreements, and user experiences, as well as extensive baseline data spanning over ten years. Using these tools, we aim to study how the existing Internet infrastructure can sustain exogenous “shocks,” such as the current COVID-19 pandemic, that dramatically shift the location, nature, and scale of network traffic. This question entails both technical and societal implications. On the technical side, we will explore how network traffic patterns have changed under pandemic “stay-at-home” orders, and how the performance of both networks and popular web applications have responded. These findings can help Internet service providers, content providers such as YouTube or Netflix, and application developers better respond to future surges and shifts in demand, as well as understand how different parts of the network, from the access links to the interconnects, respond to global stresses.