Introduction
This security article's title is perhaps slightly more "popular" than the article's contents may meet.
Only slightly though. As we shall see, serious organizations consider the swine flu to affect the Internet severely.
The scenario
The way someone fears that the Internet might be "infected with swine flu" is like this:
- Many more people are going to be at home as a result of the swine flu pandemic.
- This will result in increased pressure on the available bandwidth from people's homes.
- Since bandwidth from homes are not set up by infrastructure providers in such a way that all can use this in full at the same (day)time, the result will be congestion.
- Critical tasks for businesses, governments and organizations may suffer.
As you can see, the predicted problem is not the backbone network, but rather the endpoints - often referred to "the edge" of the Internet.
The probability of this being a problem is seen by sosme as serious, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security has requested information about consequences of such a scenario (see references below).
An analogy
The Internet can be seen as part of a country's infrastructure. And as such, it has the same characteristics as other parts of the infrastructure.
The networks of roads are good to use as an analogy. These are configured to handle average, normal traffic efficiently, which is why there is always congestion during rush hours and whenever events occur, which results in heavier load than normal (for example breakdown in public transport). The rationale is that building roads that handle peak hour traffic is not optimal seen from a macroeconomic point of view.
The same principle applies to the Internet infrastructure. The bandwidth suppliers have built the system to take care of normal traffic, not exceptional situations. It is estimated that a pandemic situation results in 40% of the workforce being away from their workplace. Obviously not all will use the Internet from home, but is seems safe to assume that home use will increase significantly. Children at home as a result of illness, will further increase bandwidth use during daytime, obviously.
Likelyhood
The probability of a breakdown of parts of the Internet due to an incident as described above will obviously differ between countries. Those which do not have an infrastructure using high-capacity high-speed access points from ordinary homes will most likely be more vulnerable to congestion issues, than others.
However, seen from our point of view, it does not seem likely that most modern societies will have problems so severe that critical tasks will suffer significantly.
Remedies
In the long term the obvious remedy is to extend the bandwidth to be able to handle more traffic.
A short term remedy that is technologically feasible is for the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to block certain types of traffic known to be particularly bandwidth consuming and not critical for necessary tasks. Streaming of video and music may be an example of such.
Whether this is contractually possible, however, is another matter - it may be a violation of the agreements between the ISPs and their customers. On the other hand, if a country is experiencing problems with bandwidth congestion, ad hoc governmental regulations seem to be a way to avoid this contractual issue.
References:
- Press release from Gartner group: "Gartner Says Internet Bandwidth Supply May Not Meet Demand During a Pandemic"
- U.S. Government Accountability Office: "Influenza Pandemic: Key Securities Market Participants Are Making Progress, but Agencies Could Do More to Address Potential Internet Congestion and Encourage Readiness" - summary and recommendations
- U.S. Government Accountability Office: "Influenza Pandemic: Key Securities Market Participants Are Making Progress, but Agencies Could Do More to Address Potential Internet Congestion and Encourage Readiness" - full report
