Todd Kiehn, VP of product management, GTT, shares how global internet service providers have been collaborating to scale the internet’s capacity to meet surging demand during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since the outbreak of the novel Coronavirus, the internet has become even more vital as a means to help people stay connected. It allows us all to overcome physical distances, share information instantaneously and continue to collaborate. Across the world, the internet is enabling critical applications that help us adapt to life in the home environment including teleworking, distance learning, telemedicine, video chat, streaming and remote gaming.
While online usage rates have seen exponential growth at times over the past decades, nothing compares with how much more we’re interacting online during this global pandemic. At GTT, we have seen a surge of roughly 30 percent in total traffic across our internet network since the outbreak of the pandemic. This growth rate is typically experienced over the course of an entire year, rather than a few weeks.
Network operators are well equipped to manage dramatic increases in traffic, but to understand how this works on a global scale, it’s useful to understand how the global internet works.