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PingER was originally set up for monitoring connections between High Energy Physics (HEP) sites that were mainly at National Labs and Universities in the US, Canada, Europe, and Japan. As a result, most hosts being monitored were and still are involved in Research and Education and have high-performance network links form organizations such as: Canarie, ESnet, Internet2, GEANT, DFN etc. Such network connections have sufficient capacity to accomodate changes in traffic patterns. These networks are deliberately well provisioned to enable research and explore the future etc. Another reason pointed out to me by Wade Hong of Carleton University is "Due to the students in residence being asked to vacate for social distancing. With many university LMSes (Learning Management Systems) now cloud-based, and the use of cloud media services for streaming of recorded content, the potential bottlenecks have moved from the institution to these services."
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 that are probably engineered to be good enough for the typical traffic, and thus more likely to be impacted by unexpected changes in traffic patterns caused by Covid-19 interventions.
The types of interventions that we may expect to make noticeable changes in Internet traffic patterns, and possible changes in ping jitter due to changes in path utilizations, include:
- Lockdowns;
- Closing/suspending schools, colleges, sporting events, public meetings etc;
- Thus we might expect to see impacts on hosts at universities. However, as pointed out by Wade Hong of Carleton University "Due to the students in residence being asked to vacate for social distancing. With many university LMSes (Learning Management Systems) now cloud-based, and the use of cloud media services for streaming of recorded content, the potential bottlenecks have moved from the institution to these services."
- Imposing a curfew;
- Calling a state of emergency;
- It is probable that the increases in cases and deaths that are publicized will result in changed behaviors and people voluntarily sheltering in place working from home etc. however we do not regard this as an intervention.
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