Scott McPherson's Web Presence

In my fourteen years of pandemic lecturing, I frequently use the old Booz, Allen warning that socially distanced home workers in a pandemic could "lose the Internet." 

Here's exactly what that means.  Imagine an Internet scenario comparable to a fusion of Michael Jackson's death and Black Friday online sales. During the pandemic, parents are slaving over their computers, trying to do their work from home.  Or one parent is working while another is trying to re-watch The Irishman on Netflix.  Or The Mandalorean on Disney+.  And Bryce, bored as Hell because schools are all closed, boots up the PS4 to play Fortnite (again) with friends. 

Now imagine this scenario being replicated tens of thousands of times -- simultaneously -- in your own community.  Now imagine that scenario magnified nationwide, to millions of homes. 

Crashing game servers are the least worrisome problem.  Crashing Internet service providers are the real concern.

We have no Earthly idea what will happen to the Internet if and when this scenario becomes a reality.  It's a question that has not been asked since 2009.  Now, one would imagine that the Internet is a far more resilient utility, with all these multiple carriers.  But there is something called the Last Mile.  Last Mile carriers are essentially that:  telecommunications carriers who handle everybody's (or almost everybody's) common Internet traffic at one point or another within a community. From Wikipedia:

The last mile is typically the speed bottleneck in communication networks; its bandwidth effectively limits the bandwidth of data that can be delivered to the customer. This is because retail telecommunication networks have the topology of "trees", with relatively few high capacity "trunk" communication channels branching out to feed many final mile "twigs". The final mile links, being the most numerous and thus the most expensive part of the system, as well as having to interface with a wide variety of user equipment, are the most difficult to upgrade to new technology. For example, telephone trunklines that carry phone calls between switching centers are made of modern optical fiber, but the last mile is typically twisted pair wires, a technology which has essentially remained unchanged for over a century since the original laying of copper phone cables.

So now you understand the problems that can arise when Fortnite meets Netflix meets work from home plans. And since every home in America will probably be using the Last Mile (unless you have fiber to the home or satellite Internet), the potential to "lose the Internet" is there.  It's just that no one knows how, when, or how bad this could be. Adding to the problem is that home Internet connections fall under the category of "best effort."  Many of us would argue that "best effort" is an oxymoron.  Emphasis on the "moron" part. Corporate and government networks, by contrast, usually have Service Level Agreements with their Internet and broadband partners. These agreement spell out expectations for service delivery and penalties (including financial penalties) for outages. Sadly, home users cannot get SLAs, as they are known in the industry.  

CIOs, CTOs and other IT managers should anticipate these problems as their clients attempt to log in remotely.  The bottlenecks from their VPN traffic will be self-limiting as to how many simultaneous remote connections they can support. Plan to manage that access in some way or another.  Possibly limiting the time an employee can be online with the corporate servers.  Organizations who utilize cloud technology are not immune from this Last Mile problem, but the load management is offloaded (pun intended) to the cloud provider.  But prepare for some unexpected costs, just in case.

Finally, little Bryce or Amanda will ultimately get bored with Fortnite (hard to believe, true) or CoD, and eyes will wander over to your work laptop.  Be aware of this and keep his (or her, appropriately) hands off the work PC!  No better way to bring down a corporate network than a combination of curious child, work computer and infected Internet link. We don't need Ransomware invading a work environment during all of this other stuff.