Netflix, YouTube and Disney Plus must give way before we run out of bandwidth

Friday, 27 March 2020

OPINION: Congratulations everyone. At 9.15pm on Tuesday, we put a 2.75 terabits per second demand on the broadband network, beating our previous record of 2.6Tbps achieved during the last Rugby World Cup.

The spike in traffic is, of course, attributed to more of us working remotely and being locked indoors during the evening.

Credit given where credit is due. Chorus' infrastructure – which is shared by Spark, 2Degrees, Vodafone and all other major broadband providers – appears to be doing well at handling the burden.

Its public relations staff are also doing well, posting regular media updates regarding the surge in traffic with calm commentary such as: 'The increase in traffic was expected as households settle in to the Covid-19 lockdown', and 'As new behaviour patterns settle during the lockdown we expect network traffic levels to reach a steady state', and most reassuring of all: 'There is no congestion in the Chorus network'.

* Mobile operators confident call failures won't be ongoing issue during lockdown**

Netflix has downgraded the quality of its streams by 25 per cent to help preserve broadband.

That's because the current network capacity is 3.5Tbps (3500Gbps). Following the traffic peak on Tuesday, Netflix agreed to downgrade the quality of its streams by 25 per cent. The following night's traffic peaked at 2.64Tbps.

Job done? I'm not convinced. Over the next four weeks there's bound to be something that triggers a surge in internet activity as the world goes into lockdown.

If, or when, we do reach our 3.5Tbps capacity, which course of action will we decide to take? The costly and time-consuming option would be to increase the capacity by upgrading the network further.

A more controversial option would be to discuss if net neutrality, where all traffic on the internet is treated equally, is still the right model for us.

In a normal world, I'd argue that net neutrality is something we should strive to keep. I don't like the idea of ISPs having the power to pick and choose what sites they do or don't throttle.

But this isn't a normal world right now. Far from it. It's a world where we're not allowed to leave our houses. And in this temporary world, our country's bandwidth is a more valuable commodity than ever before.

David Court says streaming services keep us entertained during the lockdown but the broadband network creeps towards 3.5Tbps capacity, surely the responsible course of action is to regulate the amount of data certain services use.

Is it right, in a time of crisis, that the likes of Netflix, YouTube and Disney Plus hog every available megabyte? Probably not.

Yes, we're all looking to these services to keep us entertained for the next several weeks.

But as we creep towards that 3.5Tbps capacity, surely the responsible course of action is to regulate the amount of data certain services use.

Netflix users streaming Tiger King in 4K probably isn't the most effective use of our country's limited bandwidth. Not when we have people stuck in their homes craving social interaction, or worse still, people who need a working broadband connection to work from home.

This is all hypothetical, of course. And I hope it doesn't come to it. We still have about 1Tbps of bandwidth buffer to play with right now, after all. But who knows what's going to happen over these next few weeks?

Streaming videos, talking to friends on FaceTime, online gaming. We're all doing it a lot more than we normally would.

The Government has done a good job working out what's an essential service in the physical world. But how prepared is it to make the same calls in the online world?