Why the coronavirus lockdown is making the internet stronger than ever

In addition to the increase in traffic, sheltering in place strains the internet in two more ways. First, last-mile connections—the ones that run from local exchanges or data centers to your home—are typically the weakest links in a network. Many run over outdated cables. When broadband was rolled out in the US, for example, it often piggybacked on cables originally installed for TV. These cables were designed to pipe data into a home and not out of it, which is why uploading video from a home internet connection can be flaky. Home connections also tend to have lower bandwidth than those in an office or school, making familiar activities feel slower. And the narrower pipes at the internet’s fringes get congested when everybody in a neighborhood wants to use the internet at the same time. A second issue is that internet companies are now having to handle traffic from multiple locations instead of a handful of hubs.

Telecom companies like Comcast, content makers like Netflix, retail giants like Amazon, virtual storage providers like Dropbox—plus a host of other data centers and cloud services—have piped in new connections, shored up old ones, and wired up millions of superfast servers. The investment has massively increased capacity, speed, and performance across the board. “The industrialization of the internet has created a powerful mesh of networks that is, for the most part, working beautifully,” says Tesh Durvasula, CEO of CyrusOne, one of several international companies that help keep the internet running by installing and managing the vast clusters of computers that make up the cloud.