The increase in sustained internet traffic brought on by coronavirus lockdowns has led to speculative infrastructure that can crumble under load. Although cloud-based services (such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams) have experienced outages, possibly due to increased traffic, and broadband providers have experienced service outages, the UK has yet to experience any downtime. Significant downtime outside of the usual ranges. TechRadar Pro spoke to network monitoring company ThousandEyes about the performance of the UK's internet infrastructure, the challenges facing Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and how the pandemic could affect internet services in the future. The company detects network performance issues by actively polling thousands of views from around the world. It takes billions of measurements every day, detecting when traffic ends on ISPs and the networks of public cloud providers, UCaaS providers, and edge service providers. According to ThousandEyes, this failure detection mechanism is very specific, allowing traffic termination incidents to be isolated down to the infrastructure interfaces involved.
How do you go about finding fault?
ThousandEyes detects network performance issues (including failures) through an active network probe from vantage points around the world. The resulting network telemetry data covers latency, packet loss, and other key performance indicators. Although packet loss of any level can potentially be detrimental to users, ThousandEyes defines a failure as an incident involving 100% packet loss, where traffic is completely terminated at some point in the network.
The performance of the UK internet infrastructure has varied during lockdown, but has generally held up well. Compared to the global scale, UK outages remained generally low, standing at 21 during the first week of lockdown, the second week reaching 28. A significant reduction was seen during the third week. with only 10 breakdowns, before noting a slight increase in the fourth week with 13.
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How is the Internet in the UK compared to other countries?
Around a third of all outages in the first quarter of this year have occurred in the EMEA region. Although the duration and scope of many outages suggest that they were the result of network operators optimizing performance as traffic levels increased, we have also seen a marked increase in outages between network providers. '' collaborative applications, including video conferencing services. Comparatively, the internet in the UK has done well. We saw spikes in blackouts in mid-March, but when a second global spike occurred in early April, the UK was little affected.
What types of damage have been caused by the recent failures you have identified?
The impact of outages can vary depending on the location, time, and extent of the outage. In general, when Tier 1 ISPs, broadband providers, and large transit providers experience outages, the impact to consumers and businesses can be significant. The recent disruption of Tata Communications had broad geographic implications, as did the CenturyLink disruption last week, which prompted Merrill Lynch to publicly report disruptions to its brokerage business. Many other large businesses experienced service interruptions during the outage. Overall, the financial impact could well be in the millions of dollars.
What have been the main causes of breakdowns in recent weeks?
Failures can occur for many reasons, including infrastructure failure, fiber outage, and misconfiguration, making them difficult to predict. Throughout the month of March, as traffic usage increased to support remote work, online schools, and leisure activities, the duration and extent of network outages increased relative to pre-coronavirus. . These characteristics do not correspond to congestion-related faults. Instead, they suggest an increase in traffic engineering activity by network operators, likely in response to increased traffic usage.
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What are the biggest challenges facing ISPs today?
In general, ISPs have performed well given significantly higher network usage. As traffic volumes have increased, many have reported increased bandwidth and connectivity demands from their customers and peers. Responding to a large number of service requests may have been challenging for some providers. ISPs are also subject to increased scrutiny, given users' reliance on the Internet. Even non-network related issues like fiber outages can provide unwanted light. However, failures are inevitable, even under normal Internet conditions, and sound network strategy and operations will continue to be the best methods to limit their occurrence.
Do you anticipate any changes in the way services are consumed in the future?
The overnight transition to a remote workforce and customer base has made one thing abundantly clear to many businesses: they rely on a well-functioning internet to power all those online services and applications that are at the heart of Employee and consumer experience. In the future, we may see a change in the way companies invest in and use certain Internet services. ISPs may also review your service and investment priority given the heavy use of consumer networks.