Steps to increase your online/Internet usage efficiency during the coronavirus outbreak

The world is in the process of adapting to remote work/home office solutions. This is something that is going to last throughout the coronavirus outbreak and is a practice/paradigm that is going to remain long after the world tackles the covid19 pandemic. The world wide telecommunications infrastructure is as critical as the health system facilities and the transportation/supply chain. We need to keep the world going and if we are not coordinated and able to communicate/exchange information, this is not going to be good for us. 

As the world is correctly trying to flaten the curve of the covid19 cases to ease the burden on national/regional health systems, it also needs to flaten the load on the telecommunications infrastructure for the same reasons. Regional, national and international data networks are already facing traffic capacity problems. This is because a large number of the wired and wireless services (Mobile telephony, home broadband services) operate on a contention ratio principle. In simple terms, if we have for example 10000 users in an infrastructure, the data networks are designed to serve only 1000 of them simultaneously. The 1001st simultaneous user would either experience drop of service or degraded service quality (slow not well functioning connections). While the contention ratio principle is not directly applicable to more modern networks (say Fiber to Home/Premises), it applies to a large part of the world, where copper/telephone wire is still the medium of offering broadband services (ADSL/ADSL+). Consequently, even if you are in a country where it has very good capacity on broadband networks and telephony (South Korea,Japan, Scandinavian countries), your online actions still impact the infrastructure on countries that are less well equipped in their infrastructure (sadly most other countries, including Europe, the US, Africa, India, China).   

If these problems increase and outpace the efforts of Internet Service and Telecommunication providers to gradually increase (where possible) the capacity, ISPs will start rationing/prioritize the traffic and this will impact everyone in a negative. As a network and devops engineer, I already see this problem and I would like to suggest simple steps that will make a big impact on traffic numbers and will help everyone.

1. Avoid sending/forwarding those long 'funny' viral videos on social media/WhatsApp/Viber chat: If you are at home on an ADSL connection which is asymmetric, or on a mobile data plan in a densely populated area, you are using scarce valuable capacity (and possibly money, eating up your account credit). Is it really important that you send the video? Can you just send a text describing the situation or even a voice call, when you check on your folks/friends instead and talk about it? That might be preferable.

2. Use video calls only when absolutely necessary: That might sound harsh, right now that most of us are closed at home and we need human contact. If for example, you are a psychologist and you need visual on your patient, do use it by all means. However, if you want to call someone for a practical issue (shopping, arrange something) do you really have to video call? If something is short, practical and can be done by voice, please think before pressing the Video call button. Choose the voice only option instead. This is especially true for work online meetings with a large number of participants. If you only need to listen and watch a screencast from the presenter in an online meeting, why do you really need your camera on?

3. Please throttle down your torrent/P2P traffic: If you share large files via torrent from home/work connections, consider throttling down (limiting) the traffic both in terms of speed and number of torrent connections. Most P2P torrent applications allow you to do that. I know it is tempting to use the capacity of a good fiber connection with your hard earned money. However, be considerate to others and use the capacity you have in a responsible manner. 

4. Use Netflix/YouTube and other content streaming providers responsibly: Watching a movie/listening to music is an important entertainment human need. However, considering doing it in the following manner:

• Try not to segregate your movie choices (your partner watches one, your kids another and you on your own, just because you have your own device). It's good for the parents from time to time to watch kids movies. Try to find content that you can watch altogether from one device. Streaming services account for a very large amount of the world-wide Internet traffic. Reducing that in a responsible manner will increase network capacity and server energy bills (yes, believe it or not, the energy consumption is a fact, backend servers do consume a lot of electricity).

• If you find that you keep watching the same videos (music, other) from YouTube again and again, do consider using tools to download them and keep playing them from your local hard drive whenever you want offline. There might be of course legal issues with doing this. However, as long as you do not use your local playing for profit (unlikely that you are going to have a gig in your home for money), you should be OK. Doing that in times like this means you are a responsible person and not someone that violates copyright or tries to rob YouTube of advertisement revenue. This is my own opinion of course.  

• Please do not stream movies while you are not watching them. 

5. Please avoid queuing on call center telephone lines when possible: How many times have you been annoyed listening to that 'elevator' music while waiting to get in touch with the service desk and you have listened to the 'Your call is important for us, all of our reps are busy, please wait while we try to help you' kind of message? Well, many call centers do offer the option of calling you back at the earliest opportunity. If they do, please exercise that option, rather than keeping the phone connection playing this for an hour. You are doing yourself and the phone infrastructure a favor. 

6. Use data compression to keep the size of your files down before sending/downloading them, improve network response times and (please) do not attach them to emails: 

• Compression is not applicable for photos/images and videos and music files as these might already be compressed or may not be compressible. However, if you have plenty of large text documents (Word, Power Point, Spreadsheets, PDF documents, programming language source code) that you need to send/download from work, consider using compressions tools like these to reduce their size before a transfer. This will reduce both the burden in communication networks as well as the transfer time. 
• For the most advanced users, compression is a technology that is used to improve interactive response on latency sensitive traffic. A great example of this is the SSH compression option. When this is used in conjunction with X forwarding to gain access to remote desktop environments, it improves both bandwidth consumption as well as the response time of remote desktop environments. 
• Finally, compressed or uncompressed files, even if it is within the few megabytes size limit that mail servers accept, please avoid attaching large files on emails. This overloads mail servers and as email is critical for many business functions, I recommend using specific file sharing services instead of email attachments. Examples of services that offer file sharing functionality are given here.  

Stay safe and use the Internet efficiently and in a responsible manner!