Rest assured, even with confinement, the internet will hold. But faced with massive teleworking and heavy streaming viewing, cases of localized congestion and partial saturation remain possible. Just like using your entire mobile data plan. To optimize your connection and reduce your consumption while gaining bandwidth, follow the guide.

Would the Internet, therefore, be threatened with saturation because of forced teleworking, which concerns in these times of confinement between approximately 7 and 9 million people, as well as by students condemned to e-learning and people with partial unemployment who turn to stream videos? Unifi Malaysia will be the ultimate support that you will need there.

In this period of confinement against Covid-19, many of you are on your smartphones and PCs, working from home, or simply trying to kill time. So much so that some people fear an Internet “blackout” due to the clogging of pipes. Obviously, without the internet, containment would quickly become a nightmare for us 21st-century humans.

But rest assured: even if Netflix and YouTube have taken measures to reduce their flow and if Disney + has postponed its release in France, officially to avoid Internet “congestion”, for telecoms experts, the network of networks has nothing to fear. Neither do operators, websites, and social media.

No blackout, but slowdowns and localized breakdowns

Admittedly, the quantity of data in circulation on the Internet is constantly increasing: + around 20% per year since 2017. But network structures are constantly adapting to this increase and are sized to support higher traffic than usual. “No, the internet is not going to saturate, because it is the very principle of the internet, to interconnect networks between them to ensure that there is no breakdown and congestion. All the networks are currently at a good level and are holding up thanks to capacity planning, which consists of planning the logical evolutions of the network, in oversizing the capacities in anticipation of the whole year, with upgrades. Admittedly, containment was never planned, but network operators still foresee periods of continuous overconsumption.

A big blackout won’t happen

However, the network expert notes that with containment, “the risks are real of seeing slowdowns and localized cases of congestion.” Thus, on several occasions since March 17, ISPs (access providers) have recorded local outages, often on a city scale. But according to Nicolas Guillaume, “these are one-off and isolated cases”. And if some large operators like SFR, for example, seek to restrain Disney +, “it is above all to remind broadcasters that they refuse to upgrade their networks to allow them to operate their services without sharing their income”.