The Lockdown Effect: Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Internet Traffic

TL;DR

The COVID-19 lockdowns caused a rapid 15-20% increase in Internet traffic, primarily from residential users engaging in remote work, entertainment, and education, with the infrastructure effectively managing the surge.

Contribution

This study provides empirical evidence of traffic shifts during COVID-19 lockdowns across multiple vantage points, highlighting changes in application usage and network resilience.

Findings

Traffic volume increased by 15-20% within a week.

Most traffic shifts occurred outside traditional peak hours.

Increased traffic in applications like Web conferencing, VPN, and gaming.

Abstract

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments imposed lock downs that forced hundreds of millions of citizens to stay at home. The implementation of confinement measures increased Internet traffic demands of residential users, in particular, for remote working, entertainment, commerce, and education, which, as a result, caused traffic shifts in the Internet core. In this paper, using data from a diverse set of vantage points (one ISP, three IXPs, and one metropolitan educational network), we examine the effect of these lockdowns on traffic shifts. We find that the traffic volume increased by 15-20% almost within a week--while overall still modest, this constitutes a large increase within this short time period. However, despite this surge, we observe that the Internet infrastructure is able to handle the new volume, as most traffic shifts occur outside of traditional peak hours. When looking directly at the traffic sources, it turns out that, while hypergiants still contribute a significant fraction of traffic, we see (1) a higher increase in traffic of non-hypergiants, and (2) traffic increases in applications that people use when at home, such as Web conferencing, VPN, and gaming. While many networks see increased traffic demands, in particular, those providing services to residential users, academic networks experience major overall decreases. Yet, in these networks, we can observe substantial increases when considering applications associated to remote working and lecturing.