BEREC , the European telecommunications regulator , said today that since the coronavirus outbreak and quarantine measures were taken , no significant internet. congestion problems have arisen
The agency said that overall network has increased significantly as more people are staying home. This means that for the first time, networks are experiencing massive teleworking, remote learning and entertainment usage. However, no significant congestion issues (e.g., outages) have been reported.
At the beginning of this global crisis, many internet experts said that Internet infrastructure in Europe may not be able to cope with the increase in traffic caused by the coronavirus.
However, “Network providers have managed to cope well with this additional traffic,” the Body for the Regulation of European Electronic Communications (BEREC) said today.
The organization said there were some problems with access internet ", but they were considered local and temporary" and did not create further issues.
The organization also rewarded telecommunications providers that made some good offers for users, such as increasing mobile data.
Internet service providers responded to BEREC's requests
Furthermore, BEREC stated that not only were there no internet congestion issues, but there was also a “reduction in traffic” in some EU member states.
BEREC considered that this decrease was due to the “traffic reduction measures” taken by some companies.
Two weeks ago, the organization officially asked streaming services to reduce video in Europein order to avoid network overload.
Netflix and YouTube were the first services to implement this measure. YouTube, in fact, eventually took this measure for all users and not just for users in Europe .
Amazon Prime Video, Disney+ and Facebook also reduced video quality for users in Europe.
Akamai , Microsoft and Sonywere not approached by BEREC experts, but they also decided to reduce video game downloads during peak hours, in order to avoid network congestion issues.
On the other hand, many telecommunications providers had argued from the beginning that the infrastructure is designed for such times and that there will be no problems.
