In the past few months, there have been so many new realities we had to adjust to, but one that seemed to cut across countries, ages, status,es and occupations was video calls. Kids are studying remotely, CEOs are having video conference calls from their dining room tables, and grandparents read bedtime stories to their grandkids via Zoom. The Internet is helping us keep some of our routines and human interactions more than ever before. At Teridion, we were curious to learn how well it was doing. Here’s what we’ve learned:
A Global View In Trying Times
Teridion has thousands of probes checking the Internet status every five seconds or less. These probes are “talking” to each other so they always know what is up in terms of Internet capacity and its impacts on latency, throughput and speed. We looked at the global activity in the past two month, during which many countries went on quarantine, and compared it to the same period in 2018 and 2019.
Not surprisingly, we found that traffic increased significantly, and the impact on the quality and speed of service suffered greatly. In fact, we found that compared to last year and two years ago, Internet latency increased by at least 75%. Now, it’s one thing if you’re an individual trying to watch Netflix and a whole other story if you’re a CEO trying to run a company remotely. Data file transfers, video conferencing, remote desktop work -all of these are critical to the success of the business, and its ability to continue to function throughout this period. And since no one knows when the social restrictions will end, these are very dire statistics.
Why Some Regions Suffer More Than Others
What we noticed as we looked at this latency data, is that some countries saw worse connectivity than others. Specifically, we saw increased latency in the following “routes”: UK to Singapore, India to the UK, India to the US, and the Netherlands to South Korea. Why were these Internet routes especially crowded? We don’t know for sure, but based on the increased interest we got from specific market segments we have a couple of educated-guesses to offer:
Developing Offshore
If you’re a US or UK-based company that has developers working in India, the quarantine forced your organization to adjust to a whole new reality: Development teams working from home and making significantly more calls and remote desktop protocol (RDP) sessions directly with the US or UK teams.
Remote Studies
Another group that had to shift to remote, online sessions are international students that went back to their home countries, yet still needed to attend classes in their schools. This is likely the reason we see increased latency between Asian markets and specifically South Korea to the EU and US.
The News Aren’t All Bad
While we all wish these changes in the way we work and study came by as part of a natural evolution of the work world and society in general, and not as a result of a global pandemic, there is a silver lining. These changes were likely inevitable, as the world is getting smaller, enterprises become global and great connectivity is expected anytime, anywhere. There are benefits to working remotely, and to learning to collaborate with team members from across the globe. And the latency? There are solutions to this too. Some, like MPLS, offer great connectivity, but take a long time to set up and are very expensive (an international line can cost tens of thousands of Dollars). Teridion offers enterprises a multi-cloud-based connectivity solution that delivers MPLS-like SLAs, doesn’t require any software or hardware installations, and can be set up in a few hours. Since the solution is cloud -based, we offer a pay-per-use model that delivers significant savings.
Check it out here to enjoy high-quality, consistent connectivity, that’s fit for a new reality.