The Miracle of the Internet

The internet has performed incredibly well in the crisis. Charles Fishman, at the Atlantic, gets an inside picture from AT&T:

The surge in traffic, on the internet as a whole and on AT&T’s part of the network, is extraordinary in a way that the phrase 20 percent increase doesn’t quite capture. AT&T’s network is carrying an extra 71 petabytes of data every day. How much is 71 petabytes? One comparison: Back at the end of 2014, AT&T’s total network traffic was 56 petabytes a day; in just a few weeks, AT&T has accommodated more new traffic every day than its total daily traffic six years ago. (During the pandemic, the AT&T network has been carrying about 426 petabytes a day—one petabyte is 1 million gigabytes.)

It’s not an accident. Like HEB in Texas

…AT&T rehearses for disaster. Last May, the company ran an internal war game on how a pandemic would affect its ability to keep phone and internet service running. The company does these exercises routinely to try to get ready—to build teams of people and their reflexes, and also to understand what they will need on the ground.

Tom Hazlett at City Journal points out that the strength of the American internet in particular has been due to greater investment and non network-neutrality.

The payoff is that Netflix (or Hulu, Amazon, or YouTube) have forged bargains with ISPs: if you subscribe to Comcast, you might notice that Netflix is so integrated into its network that a button on your cable TV remote clicks you right from CNBC (owned by Comcast) to Netflix—away from the cable operator’s shows and onto a streaming “over-the-top” media platform. These non-neutral arrangements, along with side payments between the companies, fundamentally support Internet growth.

So while Netflix and Amazon have been throttling their video services in Europe, reducing their customers’ data consumption by one-fourth in response to surging demand, high-definition streaming, following a long trend, remains the U.S. norm. In a 2012 paper in the Journal of Law & Economics, Michal Grajek and Lars-Hendrik Röller found that higher levels of regulatory control (with rules designed to force network sharing) undermined investment incentives, reducing information infrastructure across Europe by 23 percent….U.S. network investments are higher than in Europe, accounting for population and relative economic output.

Despite arguments that the U.S. is falling behind, these network investments pay off. American Internet users consume considerably more data than do Europeans on a per-capita basis. According to Cisco, ISP end-users in the U.S. and Canada stream 115.6 gigabytes of data per month, compared with 43.8 gigabytes in Western Europe and 10.6 gigabytes in Asia Pacific.

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