Network Infrastructure : Surviving Pre — Pandemic Stress (Early 2020).
Abstract
The pandemic caused by COVID — 19 had an adverse effect on the human race and created certain challenges for them and the infrastructure on which their communication and working is dependent. One of them is networking infrastructure which has become the backbone of all industries and the digital world without sustainable safety measures and services this system may collapse due to an increase in the traffic and consumption of network volume. Challenges faced can be overcome by strategically planning and by building a response plan to mitigate the hurdles to ensure good connectivity and progressive working of the system.
Introduction -
In a digital world like today where everything from old mechanical switches to radios everything has become smart means can operate using a network. It is an essential utility of life for communication purposes, information sharing, business operation but network infrastructure is also not resistant to the impact of this pandemic occurring globally, seeing the essential need for communication around the world. This pandemic has caused various disruptions in various sectors of networking infrastructure –
· Scale — Workforce, Customers
· Duration — Increased load, longer operating periods
· Workforce — For maintenance and support
Due to remote working is encouraged by the authorities as a measure of prevention, service providers have noticed a spike in voice and data usage. For a while, the network might able to sustain the surge in usage but long-term strategy and planning are required as more and more people are restricted to homes eventually consuming more data. Without sufficient bandwidth to distribute the rise in customer’s need, load on a network could lead to delay, latency, interruption in the communication channel.
Before accounting for the stats first, we should investigate the reasons what result in such a reduction in speeds. There are a variety of factors why quality degradation happened. There some major challenges or hurdles for a network infrastructure to sustain this pandemic following are listed below-
1. Network Volume Distribution
2. Cyber Security
3. Bandwidth Consumption
4. Increase in Call Volume
CHALLENGE: Network Volume –
The increases in traffic volume occurred after the announcement of the following policies like educational institute closure, stay-at-home orders, dramatic changes in the volume of data utilization. Globally the utilization of network volume has increased from streaming services (Ex. Netflix, Amazon Prime) to content publishing sites (Ex. BBC News, Blogging). After seeing scenario around the world, some domain which has seen a major boost in terms of network volume utilization like Digital Education taking online classes, webinar, etc.
Industry Wise — streaming, education, social media stand out as significant rise of new traffic as the requirement for entertainment and information is more than ever before. Entire entertainment industries are being boosted by this ongoing pandemic from streaming to gaming because of govt. the policy made users strict to a certain environment.
CHALLENGE: Cybersecurity –
One of the major concerns of any networking infrastructure is how secure and reliable it is for consumers. While in a situation like this, where connectivity is at most important for us to stay connected to our workplace and with the rest of the world as it becomes the backbone of working remotely. Meanwhile, dramatic changes in working practices and the technologies used by organizations have significantly increased the attack surface of those organizations, meaning more potential endpoints for cyber-criminals to target, and a greater likelihood of vulnerabilities. Cyber Attackers have increased five folds based on the report published by the World Health Organization in which users are been phished by spam links and attachments.
In the current scenario, cyber-criminals are more actively targeting users by providing false information on COVID-19 and related material. Not only are businesses being targeted but the end-users who download COVID-19 related applications are also being tricked into downloading ransomware disguised as legitimate applications.
CHALLENGE: Bandwidth –
The increase in the consumption of network traffic volume from customers and employees who are working remotely has increased the requirement of bandwidth and the impact of this has caused latency and occasional crashes which can be experienced by some users. Articles published by network speed-test company Ookla there a significant reduction in speeds of broadband and mobile internet services all over the world. If we closely examine the figure below we can see that since the announcement of the Janta Curfew in India (22nd March) decline in speed is very significant.
In Today’s digit era consuming information via live streaming, playback of digital content has become an important way of sharing & imparting information. On the direction of the authorities, limiting the certain area in which bandwidth is consumed more like streaming service, online gaming, and live broadcasts. European authorities asked popular streaming services like Netflix & YouTube to restrict the playback quality of their streams as the load on servers and congestion in the network was rising after the introduction of lock-down and work from home policy.
CHALLENGE: Increased Call Volumes –
While telecommunication providers/operators are preparing towards huge swift in internet usage, what they didn’t expect was a surge in no. of voice calls. With the widespread off-corona-virus pandemic, people are spending more time reconnecting with friends and family in an old traditional way by making a voice call as it has the ability to connect more strongly than messaging or chatting. According to an article published by FOX Business, Verizon one of the largest telecom operator in the US have seen a surge in average no. of calls to 800 million per weekday and length of a voice call is up by 33 percent for an average day, since the announcement of work from home concept. The rise in the amount of Wi-Fi based calling also increased in this duration.
Similar trends are reported by various telecom operators about the increase in no. of voice calls per day. In the case of India before the lockdown, an average user talked for around 800 minutes per month but this figure has increased to 15–20 percent more, one of the highest globally, but usage only increased after lockdown.
Conclusion –
After analyzing the trends in the above-stated challenges, we can clearly understand that this pandemic has an adverse effect on the network infrastructure but also we have seen that authorities and network providers/operators are trying to maintain the balance for the users to have good connectivity in terms of bandwidth and volume. With a population over the world shifting homeward, the congestion in the network is very obvious but thanks to the elastic nature of most modern applications and services to adapt to the network conditions and adjust their quality as per the requirement, load/wait time may increase a little bit but operation will not be halted. In a country like India where the government has declared the Internet as an essential service and authorized the operator to do maintenance of hardware taking the current situation and load in the account. And if we talk in terms of security then both providers and consumers need to follow certain safety parameters to ensure the security of their system as well as of data. Broadband and Mobile Internet speeds have degraded due to high network traffic but still, the dip of 10–15 percent is acceptable accounting for the current situation. Overall, things are still intact and working but if the situation continues like this, then routing to a new plan for long-term sustainability is needed to avoid total failure.
