Internet providers keep up with surge during outbreak
One of the nation’s leading broadband managers said markets seeing the biggest spike in internet use could generate roughly half as much more traffic before encountering any significant performance issues — and added carriers are fast-tracking upgrades budgeted for the coming year to handle surges during the coronavirus pandemic.
Comcast, the largest broadband provider in the United States, reported a sharp increase in its Xfinity network traffic patterns during the past few weeks as schools and businesses have shifted to remote working and “Zoom parties” have replaced social gatherings to limit the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Comcast is a major carrier in Connecticut, with Xfinity offered in portions of the New Haven area and the eastern shoreline, as well as the Hartford, Danbury and Waterbury areas. The Philadelphia-based company is a significant employer as well in Stamford via its NBC Sports headquarters studio.
Others major broadband carriers include New York-based Altice USA along coastal Fairfield County, inland communities and the Torrington area; Stamford-based Charter Communications covering swaths of western Connecticut; and Norwalkbased Frontier Communications statewide. On Tuesday, AT&T noted videobased conferencing on its mobile network has tripled since the outbreak began.
“Never in my many years of building and operating and running networks did I think that I’d ... talk about our network in the context of a global pandemic — but here we are,” said Tony Werner, a Comcast president in charge of technology, speaking with journalists via a Monday afternoon conference call. “The (broadband) speeds are holding up well — there’s not any trend that makes me worried . ... Obviously we are being cautious, because there’s still more of this to come at us.”
Ookla, a Seattle company that runs the Speedtest.com and Downdetector websites, gave an independent verification of Werner’s assertion, tracking only a slight decline in U.S. broadband speeds in the past week, though mobile services had a slightly larger drop in performance.
Still, a steady drumbeat of customer complaints have surfaced on Downdetector forums allowing people to pop off about broadband issues. On the Facebook pages of carriers, users have complained of everything from “sketchy” internet service, as described by one individual on a Charter Communications page for its Spectrum service, to outright outages and accompanying gaps in responses by call-service agents.
Werner said some of those outages are likely the result of normal disruptions outside the control of carriers, such as power blinks or lines being damaged by winds, vehicular accidents and other incidents. He said Comcast anticipates demand increasing 4 percent annually, and adds broadband capacity at least a year in advance of projected demands. It is now accelerating planned upgrades to better handle traffic during the pandemic.
On average, the company has seen peak traffic spike by a third, with some markets nationally seeing a doubling of that increase, but Werner said broadband use is already starting to plateau in places such as Washington that saw an early surge in coronavirus cases.
“These networks are engineered for great fluctuations,” Werner said. “Well above 95 percent utilization — maybe even 98, 99 (percent) — is usually at the point where advertised speeds start dropping ... and you start having some performance issues. Very few customers in America are in that place, certainly on our network — it’s a small, small, small percentage.”