The US now has 31,000 dead from the coronavirus[1]. There are also 22 million unemployed[2], and the Small Business Administration (SBA) Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) loan program is out of money[3]. But, against the constant darkness of bad news, there is one shining point of good news: The internet keeps going and going and going.
That's a good thing. Because, without it, we really would be alone as we stay in place. Without it, we couldn't work at home, never mind being able to video-conference with friends and family. Without the net, we can't stream movies, order goods, and on and on and on. Not that there was any doubt about it, but the pandemic has underlined just how much we've become one nation under the internet.
When the pandemic storm first emerged on the horizon, there was a lot of fear that the internet would buckle under the load[4]. Now, weeks after the first stay at home order[5], we've found the internet is up to the challenge of tens of millions of Americans staying at and working from home.
Fastly[6], an edge cloud computing company, has found that in the New York/New Jersey region -- the hardest-hit area in the US -- internet traffic jumped by 44.6% in March[7], but download speeds decreased by only 5.5%. Meanwhile, in California, traffic increased by 46.5% in March, while download speed remained largely unchanged (actually increasing by 1.2%). In short, Fastly said, "We can confidently say that the internet is holding up quite well despite experiencing a persistently increased load."
Nokia[8] has seen video-conferencing traffic explode by 700%[9] since Feb. 1, as well as 40%