Nokia Warns Traffic May Spike Again Amid COVID-19 Surge

The global pandemic and widespread lockdown measures resulted in a 30% to 50% spike in network traffic in just a few weeks earlier this year, according to Nokia Deepfield’s latest Network Intelligence Report. Many network operators in Europe and North America experienced a year’s worth of traffic growth in a matter of weeks. The global pandemic and widespread lockdown measures resulted in a 30% to 50% spike in network traffic in just a few weeks earlier this year, according to Nokia Deepfield’s latest Network Intelligence Report. Many network operators in Europe and North America experienced a year’s worth of traffic growth in a matter of weeks. Following that spike, traffic volumes stabilized at rates of 20% to 30% greater than pre-pandemic levels in May and have remained there since. However, Nokia notes that network traffic typically grows during the last four months of the year and that may happen again, especially as COVID-19 infections surge and public health restrictions are being re-instituted in many regions. Moreover, “at the time of writing this report in September 2020, there are no signs of a return to a pre-pandemic ‘normal.’ Rather, it looks as though we have entered a new network ‘normal,’ with elevated usage reflected in increased traffic levels,” Nokia Deepfield analysts wrote.  The research is based on data from network service providers across Europe and North America during an eight-month period from February to September 2020. “Having been personally involved in the internet’s evolution for more than 25 years, and having witnessed its major architectural changes and growth, I have been very impressed by the performance and resilience of service provider networks and the internet in this year of upheavals. The networks were made for this,” Craig Labovitz, CTO at Nokia Deepfield, wrote in the report. Indeed, Nokia returned to that conclusion throughout its report. Network providers were mostly prepared for the COVID-19 crisis because of four key transformational changes that were implemented across the internet during the previous decade, according to the analysts.  One critical change involves a dramatic consolidation of originating domains. “The internet is getting bigger, but also smaller,” Nokia Deepfield wrote. Between 2009 and 2019, half of the internet traffic on most networks shifted from 150 originating domains to just five. “By 2019, 90% of internet traffic in service providers networks was originating from fewer than 150 sources.” The rise of hyperscale giants, and their respective networks of distributed cloud data centers, also eventually facilitated an improved quality of service and created new service opportunities for operators, according to the report. As a result of these changes, the share of internet traffic from content delivery networks (CDNs) grew from less than 25% in 2009 to almost 90% by 2019. This growing contribution from hyperscalers and CDNs has allowed network operators to customize connectivity services with the delivery of higher bandwidth and lower latency, according to Nokia Deepfield. The threat surface and potential for malicious activity has also grown significantly during the last decade and the ongoing COVID-19 crisis, the vendor noted in the report. There was a “steady increase in the overall volume of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) traffic” during the first weeks of the lockdown phase of the pandemic, the analysts wrote. “Aggregated data from five large service providers showed that by April, DDoS traffic exceeded pre-pandemic levels by 40%,” Nokia Deepfield wrote. That increase, it added, is attributed to a jump in online gaming and growing abuse of DDoS amplifiers in Europe and North America.  Nokia also last month, in its 2020 Threat Intelligence Report, reported that malware infections on IoT devices surged 100% in a year and said those connected devices comprise about 33% of infected devices compared to about 16% in 2019.  The global rise in internet traffic was fueled by a rapidly growing use of specific applications that occurred within the first weeks of widespread lockdowns. Traffic from video conferencing apps jumped at least 350% and up to 700% on some networks and online gaming grew at least 100% in the weeks that immediately followed the World Health Organization’s decision to designate COVID-19 as a global pandemic.  “Never has so much demand been put on the networks so suddenly or so unpredictably,” Manish Gulyani, GM and head of Nokia Deepfield, said in a statement. “With networks providing the underlying connectivity fabric for business and society to function as we shelter-in-place, there is a greater need than ever for holistic, multi-dimensional insights across networks, services, applications, and end users.”