When people pause the Internet goes quiet
Recent news about the Internet has mostly been about the great increase in usage as those workers who can have been told to work from home. I've written about this twice recently, first in early March and then last week look at how Internet use has risen to a new normal.
As human behaviour has changed in response to the pandemic, it's left a mark on the charts that network operators look at day in, day out to ensure that their networks are running correctly.
Most Internet traffic has a fairly simple rhythm to it. Here, for example, is daily traffic seen on the Amsterdam Internet Exchange. It's a pattern that's familiar to most network operators. People sleep at night, and there's a peak of usage in the early evening when people get home and perhaps stream a movie, or listen to music or use the web for things they couldn't do during the workday.
But sometimes that rhythm get broken. Recently we've seen the evening peak by joined by morning peaks as well. Here's a graph from the Milan Internet Exchange. There are three peaks: morning, afternoon and evening. These peaks seem to be caused by people working from Continue reading
