The System That Actually Worked
Here’s a question that should make you shudder: What if, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the internet had buckled?
What if, just as the medical-care crisis started to spiral in New York City, in Detroit, in New Orleans, the internet in those places had stopped working—an hour at a time, a couple of hours in the late afternoon? What if the internet had slowed to half its normal speed? What if it had worked only as well as the U.S. distribution system for toilet paper or N-95 masks did?
“Oh my God,” says Avi Freedman, the CEO of Kentik, a company that helps big customers such as Zoom and Dropbox maximize internet performance, “it would all be over.”
Almost the entire nation now seems to be online at the same time, many of us using two or three devices at once—for urgent work meetings and talking with Mom, for college chemistry lectures and neighborhood yoga classes, for grocery shopping and video binge-watching. Digital life has rushed to fill the gaps created by social distancing, allowing some semblance of normalcy and keeping some parts of the economy open for business. Indeed, the things the internet lets us do are a big part of the reason people are comfortable staying confined to home, and are able to. To the degree that any institution is keeping American society knitted together during this crisis, it’s the internet.
[Evelyn Douek: The internet’s titans make a power grab]
In the United States, internet traffic carried by AT&T, one of the nation’s largest internet providers, rose almost immediately by 20 percent starting in mid-March. By the end of April, network traffic during the workweek was up 25 percent from typical Monday-to-Friday periods in January and February, and showed no signs of fading. That may not sound like much, but imagine suddenly needing to add 20 percent more long-haul trucks to U.S. highways instantly, or 20 percent more freight trains, or 20 percent more flights every day out of every airport in the country. In fact, none of those infrastructure systems could have provided 20 percent more capacity instantly—or sustained it day after day for months.
Yes, there have been hiccups. Freedman notes that “we are seeing an increase not only in traffic, but in short-duration outages.” Your laptop—or the apps you’re trying to
