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Ask HN: Will so many people working at home cause the internet to collapse?

6 points by neltnerb ↗ HN
I set up a video chat with a group of friends last night and someone posed the excellent question -- if 50x as many people are streaming video calls all the sudden, is the internet backbone actually capable of handling it?

Once the university I work for starts doing all virtual classes, will students be unable to connect due to internet outages in their locality or be unable to understand the lecturer?

Our conclusion was "probably if people's video is degraded a bit and people mostly just use voice and text" but I'm curious if HN people at places like Zoom have a better grasp on how scalable video chat is.

What best practices would be helpful to make sure that students can access online courses being streamed live, especially ones where students and teaching assistants are having a Q&A based on lecture material?

6 comments

[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 23.6 ms ] thread
hitsurume
Pretty sure the internet isn't the problem but the services you depend on being able to scale properly. The service that does the streaming needs to be able to handle the extra traffic on their servers or else everything will just crash. This is also why IT / Infrastructure people are valuable assets to an organization even though they're viewed as an expense generally.
antoineMoPa
If it can support all the Netflix streaming and gaming by night, I don't know why it couldn't handle the video conferencing by day.
fabrice_d
At least for Netflix, a lot of the traffic doesn't leave the ISP edge network, because they use Netflix caches (and YT ones also). So that can be very different from video conference traffic.
runjake
We are trying to keep it going and so far, no worries.

We all have various contingencies planned, and I can see the backbone operators de-prioritizing non-essential traffic if it came to that.

rerx
There are reports from Switzerland that the government considers to block video streaming as the Swisscom infrastructure is overly taxed.

I have only been able to find German language sources (I'd suggest to try DeepL translator or similar) like this one https://www.nzz.ch/technologie/die-kommunikationsnetze-sind-...

neltnerb
That makes sense, thanks.

How can they tell when for instance zoom is encrypted, or generally the main presenter does need to show their presentation?