Research has shown that since the lockdown began, internet speeds on fixed and mobile networks have decreased for all operators. Here’s the data
Everyone at home, everyone on the Internet. And Internet slows down: it’s not only an impression of users in the last weeks, those of the quarantine, it’s really true and, now, there are also the numbers of how much Internet has lost speed in Italy because of the great increase of traffic.
An important performance drop, both on fixed and mobile network. The numbers have been provided by nPerf, a company that, through its website, measures the performance of users’ Internet connections. And from the sum of all the speed tests carried out from the beginning of January to March, it emerges a drop of 25% in the speed of the mobile network and 10% of the fixed one. In some cases, after the drop there has been an ascent. In others, as for all mobile connections, the ascent is still waiting. nPerf has tested the speed of the mobile networks of Tim, Vodafone, WindTre and Iliad and of the fixed networks of Fastweb, Telecom Italia, Vodafone and WindTre.
Slow Internet: the data
All operators have taken the hit with the growth of traffic, but some more than others. According to nPerf data, in fact, in January the average speed of a mobile connection of Vodafone and WindTre was about 34 Mb/s, while in March Vodafone dropped to about 23 Mb/s and WindTre to about 29 Mb/s. Iliad and Tim were traveling at 30 Mb/s and have dropped to 24 and 23 Mb/s, respectively. Also on mobile networks, then, the performance of streaming content dropped: the average loss was 4%, with Vodafone losing more than the others and WindTre first losing and then recovering.
As for fixed networks, however, the drop in speed is less: an average of 10%. But, also in this case, with some significant differences not so much in the bitrate (i.e. in how many data are exchanged per second) but especially in the latency of the connection (the time between the user’s request and the beginning of the server’s response). The growth in latency, in fact, has even reached 15%.
March 2020: traffic doubled
This is the Italian situation that, however, could soon be replicated elsewhere because, in March 2020, Internet traffic literally doubled compared to that of March 2019. This time, the data is provided by Akamai, a company that provides connectivity services to a good half of the global Web bigwigs. If in March 2019 the global average traffic was 82 Terabytes per second, last month Akamai recorded an average traffic of 167 Terabytes per second. And in that number, of course, is all the reason for our slow connections.