Movistar detects an increase in internet traffic of 10% due to the coronavirus
The coronavirus is causing great social isolation and more so now that schools, institutes and universities are closed in Spain. Movistar has revealed that all the changes we are undergoing and all the closures are causing great changes. Although we lose physical social life, it seems that we are gaining digital social life.
Madrid and the Madrid Autonomous Community are currently the most affected. The increased restrictions are leading to more people spending time online . Today, the city of Igualada and three other Catalan towns were placed under lockdown. Naturally, all of this will have a significant impact on our habits, as we all want to stay entertained.
[amazon box="B07SXMZLPK"]Increase in internet traffic according to Movistar
It appears that the closure of schools in Madrid alone has generated a surge in network traffic. Data consumption has shown a 10% increase . Movistar's infrastructure now has to handle an additional load of 1.000 GB per second. This seems to be a major stress test for the company's infrastructure.
According to Movistar, the increase is mainly due to video game fans. They have reported that the volume of traffic due to video games has tripled. It seems that the star platform is PlayStation, followed by the Blizzard platform for PC and finally the Xbox service.
It is not the only thing that has seen increased traffic these days according to Movistar. Traffic on WhatsApp has doubled. While in the connectivity and work tools, Skype and WebEx have also seen double the traffic.
All this in just 24 hours of change and only in the Community of Madrid. On Monday Catalunya, Galicia and the Valencian Community will not have activity in schools, institutes and universities. This could lead to a brutal increase in traffic. We are already looking forward to seeing the PornHub data, which would explain the toilet paper shortage in supermarkets.
I think it helped that traffic a lot playing in the cloud (where the game runs directly on the server), and not only the speed, if not, the stress of all users using the network at the same time. It must be taken into account that the screen of each player has a different plane (video streaming) in the main 3d map, and to that is added the coordination of each action of each player. All of this reduces the responsiveness of the network (increases latency and reduces bandwidth)