Coming Bandwidth Issues

Interesting point raised by this article. Most broadband networks are optimized to account for most business use during the day and most residential use at night and on weekends. That way the network operator gets proper network usage spread out over many hours on the same network. But what about today during the nationwide self-quarantines?

Kids at home and people working from home are contending for the same network connection and bandwidth from the home. And most of that traffic is now video as kids get their school courses via video apps while most business meetings have moved online via conferencing apps like WebEx. Making the network bottleneck worse. And this is without even mentioning the growing video gaming usage and over the top video services like Netflix used by both kids and adults.

Then you add in the fact that these networks are "shared" networks - meaning there's only so much bandwidth to go around. (This is why if you pay for "up to" 200 Mbps of bandwidth you only see those numbers if you do a speed test in the middle of the night when nobody else is on the network.)

People with fiber or cable connections in metropolitan areas are probably OK. But if you just have a DSL connection you may find yourself rationing the bandwidth. Possibly taking turns being online (like back in the days when the online connection was connected to the telephone line and if someone picked up an extension it crapped out your connection). Never mind current satellite bandwidth options - their monthly data caps were probably topped after just one week of at-home quarantine.

Sure people living in rural communities are probably less likely to get sick from the Wuhan Virus but solutions to rural broadband issues should be part of whatever plan is put in place to prevent this from ever happening again.