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Introduction

This addresses the question of whether the PingER data can identify the impact of COVID-19 on the Internet. According to https://thrivenextgen.com/covid-19-impact-on-internet-performance/ Most Internet Service Providers (ISPs) oversubscribe their bandwidth and networks as typical inbound and outbound traffic are bursty and often don’t sustain high levels on a continuous basis. Fortunately, most of the larger National Providers have had sufficient time to prepare for the impact of COVID-19 and plan for the possibility of business workloads shifting to the home. Regardless of this capacity planning, Internet traffic patterns are about to change drastically based on schools across the country opting for virtual learning and business work from home migrations. Also, Time Magazine April 5/ April 15, 2020, reports that "traffic worldwide is up 35%...Demand is highest in the evening in the past two weeks, says networking firm Century Link."

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To get a better idea of the overall impact we looked in more detail at 18 major countries in Africa that included 62 monitored hosts in Southern Africa (Top Level Domains: ZA, LS, BW, NM), East Africa (BI, ER, ET, KY, MG, ML, MZ, RW, SD, TZ, UG, ZM, ZW), and  Central Africa (AO, CM, CD, GA)

• There was also 1 host in Mozambique, 2 in Botswana, 1 in Cameroon, 1 in Eritrea, 1 in Ethiopia, 1 in Sudan, 1 in Tanzania and 1 in Zambia that had insufficient PingER data to draw any conclusions.
• We could find no interventions of the above kind for Burundi (2 hosts), Eritrea (1 host), Mozambique (4 hosts)  and Rwanda (1 host2 hosts).
• Of the remaining 50 hosts, 24 had noticeable IPDV changes within a week of the start of an intervention.

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