Prof. dr. Borka Jerman Blažič published an article on the official website of the Slovenian Association for Computer Communications and Internet (ISOC-SI) in which she addresses the questions of whether the Internet will survive network congestion due to increased traffic during the COVID-19 pandemic and what the state of Internet "health" was during that period.
The article states that data on increased traffic in the Internet network show that the Internet is very resilient and that no major problems were detected. The author highlights that the pandemic once again exposed the long-standing problem of the digital divide between digitally poor and digitally rich populations, where the poor have no access to the Internet regardless of where in the world they are located. The issue of paying for Internet access and telephone communications for the part of the population connected to the Internet is also mentioned.
The article reports data on traffic increases in the last days of March in the USA compared to the same day in February: home broadband and wireless usage was up by 24 %. Other traffic changes include: instant messaging (up by 63 %), text messaging (up by 41 %), voice calls (up by 33 %), video calls (up by 4 %), email (down by 18 %), web browsing (down by 5 %), use of audio, web and video conferencing tools (up by 400 %), large-scale webcast events (up by 200 %), and AT&T's global audio-conferencing solution (up by 200 %).
