Working From Home: Will It Crash The Internet?

Businesses all over the world are making changes to their basic operations because of the unprecedented impact of the coronavirus. For a lot of companies, that means setting up employees to work from home and continue to deliver services to clients. 

There are worries, however, that the already-creaking internet infrastructure will buckle under the demands placed on it, and that working from home will crash it entirely.

Reasons For Hope

Will the internet crash? It’s a legitimate question. 

Already, we’ve seen reports in some areas that internet speeds are down around 20 percent from their peak, and continuing to fall. Big companies like YouTube and Facebook say that they will be reducing the quality of videos across the board. They want to cut the amount of data shifting between computers, so there’s already a lot of concern out there that internet speeds could take a hit.  

But with that said, the chances of the internet going down because of shifts in working habits is pretty small. And the reason for this comes down to the nature of how people used the internet before the pandemic. 

Back in the good old days, the majority of data people consumed was for streaming services, like Netflix and Vimeo. Video, it turns out, is the most data-intensive form of communication on the internet, and responsible for something like 80 percent of all traffic using the network. 

Businesses, therefore, probably won’t add a great deal to network demand. The reason for this comes back to the type of communication that they do. Mostly, it is sending emails and uploading blogs onto websites. They’re not in the market of downloading dozens of videos every hour or uploading HD content. Thus, the marginal impact will likely be low. Text barely requires any bandwidth. 

Then there’s the fact that a lot of companies are also using their own infrastructure. The rise of Mikrotik VPS and other private cloud solutions means that a lot of businesses won’t place any additional burden on third-party services. Regular users, therefore,  won’t see much of a change in service quality.  

The biggest threat actually comes from the mere fact that more people are at home throughout the day. Furloughed workers – and those working from home – will undoubtedly consume more media. And, therefore, it could be their attempt to pass the time that ultimately leads to our downfall. 

Remote Working: Some Home Truths

Working from home is an opportunity for companies to switch to more of a cloud-based and flexible model. The work-from-home experiment, if successful, will probably usher in a new working paradigm. It won’t make sense for companies to keep their IT in-house anymore. There’s just no practical reason to do so. Part of their pandemic mitigation strategy will inevitably involve a degree of outsourcing to third parties. Plus, their colleagues may demand it. 

So, in summary, the internet is unlikely to crash as a whole, even though we’ve seen some slowdowns. And the most significant risk isn’t businesses going online – it’s regular customers who have nothing better to do with their time than watch TikTok all day.