The COVID-19 affirms “the internet” as a universal and essential service, as does electricity. COVID-19 has highlighted the disparity between rural and urban in available internet service providers and digital bandwidth.
With the emergency, that we take home as a teaching, it is clear that we will never go back to what we did before, even when the virus will be eradicated, is that smart working will be a tool to use widely. But please don’t call it “work from home” more than “Work From Anywhere”. We have gone from nothing to everything in an extreme way, but I find a middle way for the future absolutely sensible for many reasons: less traffic around, less pollution, less costs also for the company because obviously there is less, for example, the impact on heating and cooling of environments.
internet as an essential service, as much as electricity, water and gas. When the national lockdown was declared, network traffic increased by about 70%. In one night. Equal to the increase that is normally recorded in a year. No operator even in the worst nightmares could have wished for something like this. Yet the network held up, perhaps with some slowdown, but nothing dramatic. With this emergency we have also realized that we are not only hungry for band, but especially for band available in uplink. Today with the great increase in video calls, internet calls, network gaming, cloud usage, uplink bandwidth has become almost more important.
Access to Services
The first major worldwide network stress experiment, never before in the world, in the 26 years that the internet has started to be such a widespread network, there has been such a sudden surge in traffic. The same thing has happened everywhere, in France, Germany, the United States: everyone has seen traffic grow almost twice as fast. Fortunately, the internet has been designed since the 1970s to be very resilient.
Today more than ever before we can say this: Declare the internet an essential service.
Guarantee equitable access to fast, reliable, and unfiltered internet for all. Put plans in place today to connect the world in a way that promotes a broad-based human development
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