Using Motion Charts to look at PingER data by metric versus Covid cases
One attempt to explore and correlate the impact of the Covid-19 virus on Internet responsiveness is to use a Motion Charts tool from https://www.charte.ca/ to look for correlations between say Covid-19 cases (cases, hospital admissions, deaths etc.) and PingER metrics as a function of time, by country, continent, plus population or density of population. The idea is that as Covid-19 cases pass say 100, the country will impose interventions such as school closing, social distancing etc. which will change the usage patterns of the Internet which may have noticeable impacts on the PingER measurements. We use the PingER 'Last120days' data measured from SLAC as provided and updated daily in https://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/prmout/. The data is available by metric, country Monitoring Agent (in this case pinger.slac.stanford.edu)' as Excel csv files, e.g. ipdv-EDU.SLAC.STANFORD.PINGER-country-last120days.csv. By means of a script covid.pl we create Excel csv files available at https://www-iepm.slac.stanford.edu/pinger/covid/ by PingER Metric and Covid-19 Confirmation cases or deaths, e.g. ipdv-confirmed.txt for the last 120 days. These covid/ files are suitable for copying into www.charte.ca to create motion charts for a selected Pinger metric's data vs Covid-19 cases by country by day. N.b. both the PingER 'last120days' data and the tables of the Covid-19 versus the PingER metric are availble publicly via the web, so you can make your own motion charts (see
See Using Chart.ca for how to make your own motion charts, and an example. Note since the Covid-19 data for the USA and Austrailia are only available by state and for China are only available by province we currently have not included those countries. Some examples are below
PingER Metric raw daily | Covid-19 Confirmed (Selected) | Covid-19 Deaths (Selected) | Covid-19 Confirmed (Europe) | Covid-19 Confirmed (Africa) | Covid-Confirmed (Latin America) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ipdv or jitter (msec) | Motion | Motion | Motion | Motion | |
| Throughput (kbps) | |||||
| Average RTT (msec) | Motion | ||||
| Unpredictability (%) |
We repeated the above except:
- To smooth out the PingER data we used a running average of the data over the last 7 days,
- Also rather than displaying the bubble size as proportional to the population, we made the bubble size proportional to Population in thousands / country's area.
PInger Metric running 7 day average | Covid-19 Confirmed (Selected) | Covid-19 Deaths (Selected) | Covid-19 Confirmed (Europe) | Covid-19 Confirmed (Africa) | Covid-Confirmed (Latin America) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ipdv or Jitter (msec) | Motion, Scatter | Motion | |||
| Throughput (kbps) | |||||
| Average RTT (msec) | |||||
| Unpredictability (%) |
- Motion chart of PingER IPDV (Inter Packet Delay Variability or Jitter) vs Covid-19 Confirmed cases with bubbles sized by population density for Latin America
- Motion chart of PingER IPDV (Inter Packet Delay Variability or Jitter) vs Covid-19 Confirmed cases with bubbles sized by population for selected countries colored by continent
- Motion chart of PingER IPDV (Inter Packet Delay Variability or Jitter) vs Covid-19 Confirmed cases with bubbles sized by population for Europe
- Motion chart of PIngER IPDV (Inter Packet Delay Variability or Jitter) vs Covid-19 Confirmed cases with bubbles sized by population for Africa.
- Motion chart of Pinger Average RTT vs Covid-19 Confirmed cases with bubbles sized by population for Africa.