Schools across Italy are completely closed, which is driving a surge in Internet traffic buried by hordes of bored (?) children forced to stay indoors and play online games.
With schools, shops and restaurants closed in an attempt to limit the worst outbreak of coronavirus in Europe, the amount of data passing through the national network of Telecom Italia SpA has increased by more than two thirds in the past two weeks.
Much of this extra activity comes from online games like “Fortnite” and “Call of Duty,” which can involve more players and take up more bandwidth than the business programs and teleconferencing apps used by adults working from home. Game traffic can increase even more when games are updated and millions of kids download the latest (25 gigabyte) update at the same time.
“We have seen an increase of more than 70% in Internet traffic on our fixed network. A great contribution comes from online games like Fortnite." This was declared by the CEO of Telecom Italia Luigi gubitosi on a call with analysts. A Telecom press release also confirms: no line problems for the classic telephone. Ditto for Alice telecom, the mail service. It is the relationship between telecom and the internet that is turbulent (it has been so since the very birth of Telecom Italia Net, the legendary Tin in 1997). Simple, corporate, private, fibre: all types of contracts seem to be affected.
Gubitosi says he is certain that the network will hold up, but there are signs that do not warrant the utmost optimism, and perhaps they are also evident from the Telecom Italia tests.
This week the national lockdown in Italy closed all but essential services. Yesterday there was a wave of reports of lost telecom Internet connections from Telecom Italia customers. The number of complaints decreased later in the day. “The Telecom Italia network works perfectly and with higher volumes than in previous days”, the company wrote in an email release. “The reported problems affected only some applications and the Internet due to an international network failure.”
“All the big players in the video conferencing market have been asking for bandwidth upgrades. In the last 10 days some have been asking for a five-fold increase,” said the Swedish vice president Telia Carrier, which predicted weeks ago a large increase in Internet use due to the pandemic.
