Infrastructure

One instruction remains consistent and clear during the coronavirus pandemic: Stay home. For many of us, that means taking our daily activities — work, school, medical care and connecting with loved ones — online. But not for everyone.

The School District of Philadelphia will not allow teachers to do “remote instruction” with students while schools are closed during the coronavirus outbreak. Because the district cannot ensure equal access to technology among students, it’s barring individual schools from providing graded virtual instruction. Superintendent William Hite said teachers cannot require students to do work remotely or grade them on that work.

As millions of users vacate dedicated business connections in favor of their home connection, providers are seeing a significant surge in virtually every state. Are these residential networks holding up? Or are they choking on the increased demand being placed on them? Here’s what the data tells us: 

Smithville Communications and SCI REMC–a rural telecommunications provider and an electric cooperative, respectively–are teaming to build fiber-based broadband infrastructure to serve their common Indiana service areas. The telco electric cooperative fiber partnership project will serve about 3,400 residents and businesses in Ellettsville, Lake Monroe and Gosport (IN) communities with homes served by copper-based services.

More people are shifting to the digital world as life outside the home is put on hold. That's putting a lot of pressure on companies to keep connections up when all their employees are trying to telework at the same time. It's also posing challenges for Internet video conferencing services. Internet infrastructure and security company Cloudflare says US Internet traffic jumped 20% on March 13, after President Donald Trump declared the pandemic a national emergency. In hard-hit Seattle, Internet use was up 40% last week compared to Jan.

The US' internet and wireless networks are coming under immense pressure to deliver reliable connectivity as schools and businesses confronting the novel coronavirus have shifted their day-to-day operations out of the workplace and into homes, according to industry analysts and government officials. "This is going to be an enormous stress test for our communications networks," said Blair Levin, a former Federal Communications Commission chief of staff and author of the agency's 2010 plan to improve internet access nationwide.

How did South Korea become a global broadband leader? Electronic Frontier Foundation did a deep dive into this question and has produced the following report. The key takeaway: government policies that focus on expanding access to telecommunications infrastructure were essential to success. 

The Schools, Health & Libraries Broadband (SHLB) Coalition asked the Federal Communications Commission to expedite affordable broadband solutions for unconnected Americans. The novel coronavirus is driving schools to online learning and increasing healthcare providers’ reliance on telehealth solutions.

The US internet won’t get overloaded by spikes in traffic from the millions of Americans now working from home to discourage the spread of the new coronavirus, experts say. But connections could stumble for many if too many family members try to videoconference at the same time. The core of the US network is more than capable of handling the virus-related surge in demand because it has evolved to be able to easily handle bandwidth-greedy Netflix, YouTube and other streaming services.

Although 5G is mainly being deployed by industry, governments and other organizations will decide how to use public resources, such as spectrum, and what obligations network operators will have to their users. Among the questions they will face are the following: