The COVID-19 pandemic’s emergence and exponential spread has highlighted the mission-critical nature of residential networks. Home networks are now lifelines, connecting us to colleagues, customers, co-workers, patients and investors, not to mention friends, family and entertainment. Many more people would be unemployed or be contributing less to the economy if not for this connectivity.
Data shows that demand for downlink bandwidth in areas affected by the pandemic have risen on average by 30% and uplink bandwidths by 50%-100%. Those increases may not yet have peaked. Such increased demand creates unexpected contention issues, which might be evident in metallic-sounding voice distortion in video-conferences, lost connections or interrupted streaming.
Meeting this increased demand will require internet service providers (e.g., large and smaller phone and cable companies), application providers (e.g., smartphone companies, social media companies, financial institutions, health care providers, teleconferencing companies, distance learning companies and other) and the entire industry to work together to make consumer applications work seamlessly.
No longer should an internet service provider, phone or cable company or application provider blame a customer problem on another company. Telephone/cable companies and application providers cannot, even accidentally, disadvantage competitive application providers by leveraging the connection-data that they have but may not want to share because that may compete with their own desire to offer applications.
When the customer’s overall experience is poor, it costs the entire industry money. The combination of diagnostic and learned optimizations of both internet provider and application providers’ connectivity-related data is very powerful. We can improve services for consumers, and the current pandemic provides an opportunity and an imperative for the industry to come together.
We must work toward a “home-centric life” future that is accessible to all at mass-market price points with largely inclusive ecosystem programs.
John Cioffi conducted the pioneering research to create Digital Subscriber Line (DSL) technology, bringing broadband internet to millions of consumers and businesses globally.
