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The analysis with the data aggregated by the country was generally unsuccessful in identifying changes in performance correlated with the interventions. This is partially due number and variety of hosts involved. By variety we mean whether or not they have high-speed Research and Education network links, whether they sites are educational, commercial, etc. We, therefore, decided to study the impact of interventions in more detail by reviewing  reviewing the data within a country by host. This enabled fewer trajectories to track by eye, and also the separation of R&E and educational links from others.

Results by region, country and by host

Asia

E Asia

South Asia (to be analyzed)

Africa

Central Africa

East Africa

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PingER was originally set up for monitoring connections between High Energy Physics (HEP) sites that were mainly in the US, Canada, Europe and Japan. Thus these regions tend to have hosts that are mainly research or educationalResearch or Educational (R&E). As a result, for the above regions, most hosts are Research and Advanced Education and being R&E have high-performance network links as opposed to public network links. Thus looking at the overall performance for a country in these regions there is little evidence of the impact of Covid-19 interventions, See, for example, the analysis for Spain and Italy, two countries that were badly impacted by Covid-19. Also see the UK.

On the other hand, almost all hosts monitored in Africa (apart from 3 in the Republic of South Africa), and South America (apart from some in Brazil and Argentina) are on public networks and thus more likely to be impacted by changes in traffic patterns caused by Covid-19 interventions.

Possible Future work

Compare weekday usage with allweek usage to see if it makes a notable difference in identifying correlations between PingER and Covid-19. DONE

Rather than use weekdays use midweek (Tue -Thu) to ensure the data avoids weekends. DONE

For each country select the type of target based on:

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The typical impacts are:

• A sustained (for a week or more) significant increase or decrease in IPDV values correlated with an intervention that may be expected to change traffic patterns.
• A change in the difference in the week day vs the weekend performance (bear in mind all times are UTC) correlated with an intervention.

Future work

Add data for South Asia.

Summarize the success by country in finding hosts with IPDV performance changes correlating with interventions in  Africa and South America

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