Networks coping, but future traffic impossible to predict

Experts say Canada’s telecommunications networks are currently handling a spike in residential data consumption caused by the working from home surge, but a lack of certainty around how the COVID-19 pandemic will develop means it’s almost impossible to project whether usage will continue to grow. Internet service providers, researchers and industry groups told The Wire Report that residential internet usage during peak times -- the highest point during a particular day -- had increased by anywhere from 20 to 45 per cent since March 16, while voice and mobile data networks had also seen a marked increase in traffic due to the pandemic. Distributel Communications Ltd.’s residential internet usage has increased nearly 50 per cent in terms of overall consumption, the company’s CEO Matt Stein said in a phone interview, while usage in the peak period had gone up, “but not drastically.” Others say that increase in traffic during the peak is higher. Toronto Internet Exchange president Kevin Blumberg said Canada’s largest internet exchange had experienced a 20 to 25 per cent increase in peak traffic, while Craig Labovitz, chief technology officer for Nokia Corp.’s Deepfield said in a phone interview that “impacted regions” in North America — places where lockdowns had been implemented and the impacts of COVID-19 had been felt most — had seen a rise in peak traffic of between 30 and 45 per cent. A Telus Corp. spokesperson said in an email that the demand on its networks had dramatically increased since March 16, with a 25 per cent increase in home internet usage, a 15 per cent spike in live TV viewing on Optik TV and a more than 30 per cent rise in video-on-demand use. While the rest of the major incumbents declined to be interviewed about the extent of usage increases, BCE Inc. last week said its home internet usage had risen by up to 60 per cent during the day, and was up to 20 per cent higher than usual at night. The traffic increases would also have been helped by moves by many providers to waive data overage charges for residential internet use as most Canadians started to work from home. That increase in working from home has also vastly increased the amount of time that internet usage hovers around that peak usage figure. Usually, the peak is reached somewhere between 7 and 11 p.m., but Labovitz says the impact of COVID-19 means it is now reached much earlier in the day, at about 2 p.m., and continues at a similar mark all the way through to late evening. “Before, if you ever looked at traffic from Canada or the U.S. it looked like a very jagged mountain, almost no traffic at 2 a.m , some modest traffic at 3 p.m., then shooting up as we got into the evening hours,” Labovitz said in a phone interview. “But basically the whole day now is beginning to look a lot like what used to be just the prime time hours, so we’re seeing a lot more usage throughout the day, though the peak continues to be 9 to 11 p.m.” The significant lengthening of the peak period has no impact on the quality of the connection in an internet user’s home though, as long as their networks have the capacity to handle that peak amount of usage, Blumberg explains. “Using the highway analogy is probably the best example: if the highway can handle eight lanes and eight cars at once, whether that’s some of the time or all of the time it doesn’t really matter,” he said. Stein, Blumberg, Labovitz, and the Canadian Internet Registry Association (CIRA) all told The Wire Report they’d seen no indication that Canada’s networks could not cope with the current increase in capacity, but a lack of certainty around the virus’s progression and measures to prevent it meant it was extremely difficult to project whether that would remain the case in two, four or six weeks. Labovitz said North American networks were designed to be able to cope with a 30 to 40 per cent increase in usage, but normally over a 12 or 16 month period, rather than inside a week. “The internet is always growing, it’s been growing 30 or 40 per cent a year forever, or the better past of the last decade if not more, so providers are always planning for this type of growth,” Labowitz said. “What’s changing of course is the time frames so I think you are beginning to see some providers look at their 12 or 16 month plans and begin to think about perhaps accelerating some of the changes. Now some of the changes are easier to implement than others, some of them take much longer.” CIRA chief technology and security officer Jacques Latour said in an email that Canada’s networks were so far surviving the “significant stress test” posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. “Many internet users have asked if increased videoconferencing or daytime Netflix viewing would ‘break the internet.’ While both are contributing to increased usage, it appears the biggest traffic spikes are being caused by online gaming downloads and updates like Call of Duty: Warzone,” Latour said. “In the meantime, our defenses appear to be holding, thanks in large part to our national network of carrier-neutral internet exchange points which keep traffic local and help take pressure off our cross-country transit routes.” At Distributel, Stein — also the president of the Canadian Network Operators Consortium — said the company had invested in network capacity, but so far had been able to meet demand without physically building out the network. Those investments involved purchasing extra capacity for the part of the network that connects out to the internet, shaping and grooming traffic to underutilized parts of the network and enabling ports that weren’t previously in use and purchasing extra capacity from the incumbent network operators. Stein said when Distributel needed construction to meet demand would be “the moment that we’re really going to be in trouble.” “Up until now we’ve been able to handle the peak, up until now we’ve been able to make changes and tailor the networks and make the modifications required in order to make everything flow,” he said. Blumberg said the Toronto Internet Exchange had doubled its backbone to deal with the extra demand, and allowed organisations dealing with congestion to upgrade their capacity to whatever level was needed for free for the next 60 days. IDC vice-president Lawrence Surtees said networks were complicated and “messy,” meaning each user would have a different experience depending on their network and where in Canada they were located. “There’s certainly a lot of pressure that’s keeping network engineers up at night and doing certain things but I think the fact we haven’t seen a huge calamity speaks well of network design today,” Surtees said. Telus, Stein and Blumberg said they had yet to see any serious latency or congestion issues that would significantly impact the user experience, while Labovitz said video qualities had remained “basically the same level of quality for all the major video providers” across impacted parts of North America during the COVID-19 pandemic. All industry professionals said there’s simply not enough data points to project whether the increase in consumption will spike further or remain steady, combined with the uncertainty around how long Canadians will work from home and whether students will do their learning virtually, rather than being allowed to return to schools. Stein said the COVID-19 situation was “truly an un-plannable event” and its impact on the country’s networks was “not going to be short”, but said it was too early to project whether traffic would continue to increase. “This is a situation where we’re going to have this spike and Canadians en masse working from home for weeks or months,” he said. “We need to plan and build the networks differently and carriers are going to need to cooperate more than ever before to make sure consumers still have access to working from home and the internet that they’re used to.” Labovitz said the uncertainty over future traffic patterns felt a lot like “the early days of the internet where we thought we understood what traffic looked like and then a new app would come out, or the first iPhone for example, and then suddenly traffic patterns changed.” “We are seeing people accelerate but I think we’re also trying to understand what the next month or two looks like in North America,” Labowitz said. There’s also other actions that can be taken to reduce usage if it gets close to reaching capacity in Canada. Netflix Inc. announced on Sunday that it had slowed its bit rate in Europe in order to reduce congestion, and the Australian government has asked it and other over-the-top (OTT) streamers to do the same thing to reduce the strain on the country’s national broadband network (NBN). Asked if Netflix should lower its bit rate in Canada, Stein said there was “no question that would help.” “I think that the idea there would be to set the default bit rate. I wouldn’t want Netflix denying people the ability to still watch 4K video and so forth but most people click on a video and start watching something and they leave it at the default,” Stein said. “If Netflix and YouTube for that matter were to adjust that default it would dramatically reduce network consumption and that would be a very good idea for Canada right now.” Groups representing small telecom service providers -- CNOC, the Canadian Communication Systems Alliance (CCSA) and the Independent Telecommunications Providers Association (ITPA) sent a letter to Amazon.com Inc., Netflix and other OTT providers on Tuesday asking them to lower their bit rates to 1080p or below until at least the end of April to help manage capacity. Labovitz said whether Netflix and other OTTs should lower their bit rates in Canada was “really dependent on the network”, and pointed out that Netflix was provided directly from servers in major cities rather than being served over long distances. “We’ve got some networks that have excess capacity to last them for really long periods, other networks may have less capacity. It’s not just a given provider but given cities may be really different,” he said. Nokia Deepfield director of product marketing Alex Pavlovic said in a phone interview early indications were the lowering of the bit rate was “working really well” in Europe, and data demonstrating its impact would be released shortly. Netflix said there was no specific update for Canada around its bit rate, while a spokesperson for Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains did not specifically address whether such a measure was under consideration, saying “we are working with providers to assess a variety of needs including network capacity.” On the mobile side, OpenSignal’s vice president of analysis, Ian Fogg, said wireless devices had been connected to WiFi more than 75 per cent of the time over the last 10 days, above the weekend level and significantly above the regular weekday level of about 68 per cent. “The trend is fairly new, it’s really only been ten days so we’ve barely got a week’s worth of data yet, so I’m a little bit hesitant to say how much it is but it’s definitely gone right up,” Fogg said in a phone interview. “We’ve got a very different pattern for the last ten days than we’ve had for any other week in 2020.” OpenSignal is yet to publish a report on Canadian wireless data consumption during the pandemic, but expects to in coming days. OpenSignal’s data from Italy showed that the increase in time connected to WiFi had actually led to a fall in cellular network speed in the country, rather than the customary improvement due to there being less load on the cellular networks. It’s in mobile where Telus is seeing the biggest increase in usage, with a spokesperson saying voice traffic had increased by 45 per cent, while wireless data had seen periodic traffic increases of up to 40 per cent — usually during major events like provincial or federal press conferences — despite most customers connecting their wireless device to their home WiFi. Text message traffic (30 per cent increase) and video and picture text messages (50 per cent) had also spiked as people found novel ways to communicate with loved ones, the spokesperson said. The spokesperson said Telus’ network was performing “exceptionally well” in all cases, and said instances of busy tones when calling a toll-free number was due to organizations receiving an unprecedented volume of calls, rather than a network capacity issue. Telus is working with other operators to help those organizations manage the increased call volumes and is encouraging businesses to host meetings using digital platforms rather than dialling in to a toll-free number, the spokesperson said. Correction: Craig Labovitz’s last name was incorrectly spelt as Labowitz. — With reporting by Adam Langenberg at alangenberg@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

Networks coping, but future traffic impossible to predict

News | March 25, 2020

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