Local Access Nets Are Not Ready for a Pandemic

A few weeks ago the FCC sponsored a panel to discuss how telephone companies and ISPs are preparing to cope with a pandemic.  The panelists observed that there will be a lot of congestion in residential access networks (wired and wireless) due to sudden surge in business traffic as people stay home and work remotely.  This may surprise you, but the biggest issue in a pandemic is that when parents are home trying to work, their kids will be home coping with boredom, and traffic loads will go through the roof.

Enterprises know how to cope with congestion and networks under stress.  They employ traffic shaping and QoS techniques to ensure that the mission critical traffic gets through at the expense of other traffic.  Users understand that the mission of their company must be carried out under any circumstances or the company, and by extension their job will suffer.

But as Robert Mayer, the vice president of industry and state affairs for the US Telecom Association pointed out, carriers and ISPs cannot deploy traffic shaping technology to manage traffic.  In fact, the recent flaps and FCC actions about net neutrality have heightened sensitivity at carriers to traffic management.

This is serious business.  For example, The U.S. Department of the Treasury, the Financial Services Sector Coordinating Council for Critical Infrastructure Protection and Homeland Security (FSSCC), and the Financial and Banking Information Infrastructure Committee (FBIIC) ran a flu pandemic exercise in 2007.  Their plan is to keep the financial industry operating by having a substantial portion of the industry’s workforce perform their functions from home.  Back in 2006 the director of the FSSCC asked us if we thought the Internet could handle the traffic.  We told him that residential access networks would likely saturate and that the plan would fail without traffic shaping.

Last month’s panel appeared to conclude that traffic shaping during a pandemic would be possible by educating the public about proper Internet procedures and good manners.  A representative from the National Association of Broadcasters suggested that local radio and television stations play a critical role in that education process.  Good luck!  Do you really think that a teenager listens to the local news, and if so will actually stop sending videos to his friends because an announcer told him to play nice?

Relying on educating home users won’t work because home users do not understand how the Internet works.  Furthermore they have no clue how much traffic any of the applications they use put on the network.  When gas hit $4 per gallon everyone in the household knew which of the family’s cars gets better gas mileage and therefore should be the one to drive.  Why do they know that?  Because the EPA told them over and over again for decades.  Consumption information is also available for electrical energy use by appliances.

But do you know which computer, program, web service, gadget, DVR, etc., generates the most traffic?  Under which conditions should you be limiting the use of which application?  How are you going to enforce that policy within your family? 

Traffic management must also extend to your ISP’s access network.  As we have written here before, the local access network is a shared resource which is a commons.  The only way to keep a commons healthy without explicit management (that bad word again) is through peer pressure.  When neighbors see neighbors misusing a resource there is a chance that people will improve their behavior.  This is what the panelists were counting on. 

Let us give you an example of where that worked in real life.  Peter was in Palo Alto during the Quake of 1989, a major trembler that struck the San Francisco Bay Area.  All phone and electricity services died.  He walked around town looking for a phone and a store that would sell him food, and he came upon a single working phone booth.  The phone had a long line of people waiting to make calls.  A good neighbor protocol spontaneously sprang into action with no one telling anyone else what to do.  As each person got to the front of the line, they made one very short call to tell a family member that they were OK.  They asked the call recipient to pass the word to the rest of the family and signed off.  These calls lasted one minute at most.  The protocol was one call that lasts one minute.  The line of people moved along quickly and efficiently.

But that kind of behavior protocol will not work at your local ISP.  You do not know who is using the resources and why or how much.  Will you also be asking your neighbors to get smart about bandwidth consumption so everyone in the neighborhood can get their essential work and communications accomplished?  The panel thinks this will happen with public service announcements.

We live in the Internet age.  People and businesses need all parts of the Internet including access networks and home networks to function under stress.  Getting ready for a pandemic, natural disaster, or terrorist attack will require more than public service announcements after the event occurs.  The industry should take a proactive role in preparing the nation.  This is not only the right thing to do, it is also a huge business opportunity for many players.