[Aside: It's nice that the Australian government has taken (in)action
to avoid video-derived congestion of Oz Internet infrastructure.
[By failing to provide a Medicare code for tele-health consultations,
and hence making individuals pay for them personally, and in full,
they've greatly reduced demand.]
From an itNews article this morning:
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/youtube-amazon-prime-forgo-streaming-quality-to-relieve-european-networks-539673
YouTube and Amazon Prime will sacrifice streaming quality in the EU to
help avert internet gridlock as tens of millions of Europeans, confined
by the coronavirus outbreak, switch to working from home.
Alphabet Inc's YouTube and Amazon joined Netflix in responding to a call
by European Union industry chief Thierry Breton to cut picture quality
to prevent overload.
...
Telecoms providers from Vodafone to Deutsche Telekom have reported a
spike in data traffic, forcing Breton to issue his pre-emptive call.
...
Drei Austria said it was seeing a 50 percent increase in voice telephony
and 15 percent in peak data loads.
He wants networks to be able to run essential services such as
healthcare and online learning for house-bound children during the
coronavirus outbreak.
...
Experts warn that reducing streaming rates may only give temporary
relief and the dilemma of whether to discriminate between essential and
non-essential traffic will resurface.
"In an ideal world, network operators would obviously upgrade their
infrastructure and invest," said Eric Broockman, chief technology
officer of Extreme Networks, a US. network management company.
"In the short term, what network operators could do to reduce the
pressure on their networks and ensure connectivity for all is to
deprioritise non-essential traffic."
--
Roger Clarke mailto:roger.cla...@xamax.com.au
T: +61 2 6288 6916 http://www.xamax.com.au http://www.rogerclarke.com
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd 78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law University of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer Science Australian National University
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