...
For example, one might expect that as schools shut, people self-isolate, are sent home from, work from home, lockdowns are imposed etc., physical person-to-person communications would migrate to the Internet and will increase the use of the Internet e.g. by virtual learning, streaming. communicating, gathering information and entertaining for example. The thought is that this will lead to different Internet patterns and possibly lead to Internet congestion. A study of the impact of COVID-19 on Internet speeds by Ookla ("TRACKING COVID-19’S IMPACT ON GLOBAL INTERNET PERFORMANCE") is directly relevant, however, it is hard to identify any dramatic impact on the latencies in the report. There is also COVID-19 impacts on Internet traffic: Seattle, Northern Italy, and South Korea which looks at the impact on Internet traffic volumes. Also companies such as Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Disney, Google have reduced the quality of their videos to help reduce traffic and congestion of the Internet (see https://www.traffic-masters.net/covid19-web-traffic-statistics/).
...
Central Africa
East Africa
North Africa
Republic of South Africa
Southern Africa excluding the Republic of South Africa
America
Caribbean
Central America
...
- 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 weekday vs the weekend performance (bear in mind all times are UTC) correlated with an intervention.
- An increase or decreases in the variability day to day of the IPDV
To get a better idea of the overall impact we looked in more detail at 18 major countries in Africa that included over 40 hosts.
Future work
Add data for South Asia.
...