How is Internet Handling the Covid-19?

The global pandemic named Covid-19 has touched and changed our day to day lives in so many ways. The good thing about this crisis is that till now it has costed minimum human lives, and all of us can’t do anything except to stay at home and maintain social distancing. Health care professionals all around the world are giving it their best to deal with huge masses of patients. Not just human lives, the global economy has also been affected by this Coronavirus crisis. Thousands of businesses around the world are closed because of not being able to work from home.

All of us are grateful to the internet and the world wide web because of which most of us can continue working from the comfort of our homes. It is definitely not easy to stay at home without the internet and do nothing all day long! As almost all the population is at home during these times, the internet is getting more usage than normal! If you are curious about how the Internet is handling this heavy usage, read below!

Can the Internet Cope Up?

Ever since the internet came into existence, we have relied on it for almost everything but during the Covid-19 home lockdown, internet usage has grown exponentially. A lot of people are concerned whether the current infrastructure can cope up with the increased internet usage and additional stress. Are there chances that we may put so much stress on the internet that we may end up “breaking the internet”?

To figure out how much stress all of us are putting on the internet, we decided to check if the median of the download speeds in the largest cities in the USA had been impacted by the additional demand of Bandwidth. 

Below we have mentioned the approach we decided to take to understand how the internet is affected, but before we get into details, here’s a summary of what we found during the initial steps of our research.

How the Internet Has Handled Covid-19?

Here is a quick summary of the crucial things we learned during the research:

• 99 out of the top 100 cities of the USA saw an increase in the median of download speeds in just the first three months of the Covid-19 Pandemic.
• The average increase in the median of download speeds is 66%
• Six cities – Tampa, Fla, Honolulu, Haw, Sacramento, Calif, Wichita, Kan, Detroit, Mich and Norfolk, Va experienced their download speeds going more than double after everyone started staying at home

These data show us that our current infrastructure can handle the usage and we have to go a long way before we end up breaking the internet. Let’s move onto the details.

What is The Need to Study Internet Speeds?

Over the years internet became an integral part of our day to day lives long before the Coronavirus crisis. The stress we put on our home and office networks is increasing exponentially and this has resulted in ISP constantly trying to provide us better, reliable, and faster internet speeds. 

All the major telecom corporations are trying to leave each other behind by trying to use better technology for high-speed internet services. Ten years ago any speed more than 10 MBPS was considered incredibly fast. We assumed that network speed around the country will be negatively impacted by the increased stress placed on them.

Median Internet Speeds During COVID-9 Quarantine

To make sure we understand everything that has been going on since quarantine. Here’s a breakdown of the list of results.

Here are top US Cities With the Fastest Median Download Speeds before Covid-19 Lockdown.

All of these cities had more than a higher median across the nation, during this period which was 21.6 MBPS. Scottsdale, Ariz is the standout, having the fastest internet connection out of tall the cities in the USA. Now let’s find out how the internet usage of these cities has changed since the beginning of the Covid-19.

Once again, all the top cities in the top ten beat the median for the nation. The median for download speed of the nation was 32.95 MBPS during the Covid-19 period. Scottsdale, is once again the fastest median download speeds in the United States kept it’s number 1 ranking.

Just one city that was in the top ten before fell down to 14th place, Virginia Beach, VA was replaced by Irving, Texas.

Why Is My Internet Still Slow?

After reading all the data it is clear that internet speeds all across the country are increasing, even as we put more stress on them while working, the speeds are on a rise. Even after all this, if you think that your internet speed is slow as usual, then chances are you don’t live in huge cities. If your speed is slow, then there are several reasons why this might occur.

• Network strength can vary from street to street and even block by block. Network speed can be impacted by how many users are on a singular network. If you live in an apartment building then chances are your network speed can be impacted by your network being overcrowded.
• Connection speeds fluctuate widely during your time of the day, you are normal to experience slow internet speeds during peak hours. Your connection may be much faster during late nights but during the period everyone is using the internet for work then speeds may be slower.

If you think that you are getting slower speeds than usual and you are not happy with your provider and your internet speed for the price you get, then we suggest you choose the fastest internet provider, if you need help finding the ideal provider for your speed then contact us.