Nokia reveals impact of COVID-19 on network traffic

The Deepfield analytics team of networking vendor Nokia has been having a look at how network traffic evolved over March.

It comes as no surprise to see that video conferencing traffic went through the roof, with some US networks experiencing 700% growth in use of the app Zoom alone. Zoom has come under massively increased scrutiny as a result and is consequently having to raise its game. It’s also interesting to see how much more popular it is, especially at the weekends, than Skype, which had been presumed to be the default off-the-shelf video conferencing choice.

The other main source of network traffic is subscription video on demand. Apparently Disney+ already accounts for 8% of all SVoD traffic in some European networks and is maintaining a higher bitrate than the incumbents thanks to the use of six different content delivery networks. As you can see there is increasingly a spike in SVoD demand in the middle of the day that now rivals the traditional evening one.

“Traffic increases continue across all regions, and networks seem to be handling these increases well,” concludes the blog. “However, as mentioned before, we are seeing additional demand placed on specific domains (peering, edge routing). Also, there is a need for the cloud-based infrastructure to scale up to support this increased demand.”