By Matthew Tooley, William A. Check, Ph.D., Rob Rubinovitz & Jim Partridge, NCTA – The Internet & Television Association
The COVID-19 (2019 novel coronavirus) pandemic caused governments around the world to issue shutdown orders resulting in a sudden shift in network traffic patterns as subscribers started using their broadband connections for tele-everything – working from home, remote learning, entertainment, social interactions, and commerce. As part of the crisis management effort, and to keep the public and various levels of government informed, operators posted reports of the status of their broadband networks in handling the increased usage.
To develop these reports, cable operators shared aggregated anonymized data with NCTA – The Internet & Television Association. In this paper, we first look at the data that the cable operators shared with NCTA as well as similar data from wireline and wireless operators. We then cross-reference the cable data with other third-party data to make some additional observations on the performance of the broadband access networks.