Beyond the Pandemic? Exploring the Impact of COVID-19 on Telecommunications and the Internet

This chapter is contextual in nature. It provides an overview of the impact of COVID-19, highlighting both the significant number of deaths caused by the pandemic as well as the economic disruption that occurred. Particular attention is paid to the role of digital technologies during the pandemic, which enabled a wide range of activities (e.g. work, education and shopping) to go online. The disruptive impact of COVID-19 is widespread and far-reaching, with the pandemic acting as a ‘change agent’ expanding and encouraging the greater use of digital technologies. The second half of the chapter presents summaries of the other chapters in the book. In doing so, it illustrates the scope and scale of the impact of COVID-19, the multitude of different challenges it has caused, and how these varied across different regions and contexts, as well as the diversity of reactions to the pandemic. Some of these reactions are technical in nature, while others are commercial and political. The summaries also draw attention to ongoing policy debates, the significance of which has been heightened by the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the ‘real’ world and substantially impacted the virtual world and thus the Internet ecosystem. It has caused a significant exogenous shock that offers a wealth of natural experiments and produced new data about broadband, clouds, and the Internet in times of crisis. In this chapter, we characterise and evaluate the evolving impact of the global COVID-19 crisis on traffic patterns and loads and the impact of those on Internet performance from multiple perspectives. While we place a particular focus on deriving insights into how we can better respond to crises and better plan for the post-COVID-19 ‘new normal’, we analyse the impact on and the responses by different actors of the Internet ecosystem across different jurisdictions. With a focus on the USA and Europe, we examine the responses of both public and private actors, with the latter including content and cloud providers, content delivery networks, and Internet service providers (ISPs). This chapter makes two contributions: first, we derive lessons learned for a future post-COVID-19 world to inform non-networking spheres and policy-making; second, the insights gained assist the networking community in better planning for the future.

COVID-19 has accelerated the shift to remote work. Enabling knowledge workers to do their jobs from home or elsewhere brings benefits by increasing labour participation, avoiding unproductive commuting time (thus reducing the carbon footprint), and reducing the gender gap by enabling a partner with domestic care responsibilities to work. Not all jobs are suitable for remote work, but far more remote work is feasible than has been typical to date. The post-pandemic new normal is sure to differ both from the pre-pandemic normal and from current arrangements. Hybrid arrangements where part of the week is spent at the office, and a part at home, might well become the norm. Employers, workers, trade unions, and governments will need to adapt to the new normal.

During the Coronavirus crisis (COVID-19) that started in 2019 and at the extensive quarantine regulations, educational institutions, companies, and individuals have reacted by shifting their teaching and learning activities to virtual spaces. Yet, although the use of online learning has increased, it has not been able to achieve the long-promised transformative effect. The COVID-19 crisis has the potential to boost online education overall or at least enable better preparation of the system for the next crisis. Ultimately, to make a digital transformation sustainable, appropriate skills are required. In this study, we adapt the dynamic capabilities foundations creating a theoretical approach to explain how educational institutions have responded to the changing environmental conditions during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Smart cities are concepts much loved by politicians and technologists but are very difficult to bring about in practice. There are many isolated applications in cities such as operating streetlamps, but very few, if any, examples of integrated applications sharing data and managing the city as a holistic entity rather than a set of disparate and unconnected applications. This is despite hundreds of trials and indicates how difficult bringing about a smart city will be. The key challenge is the wide range of interested parties in a city including the elected city authority, subcontractors and suppliers to the authority, emergency services, transport providers, businesses, residents, workers, tourists, and other visitors. Some of these entities will be primarily driven by finance, such as businesses and transport providers. Some will be driven by political considerations. Some will be concerned with the quality of life as well as financial costs. In some cases, there will be conflicting interests – the city may want as much information as possible on people in the city, whereas individuals may want privacy and the minimum data stored concerning their movements and attributes. COVID-19 does not change any of these issues, but it does increase the importance of some applications such as smart health, logistics, people surveillance, data security, and crisis management, while reducing the importance of others such as traffic management. It may result in more willingness for monitoring and data sharing if this can be shown to result in better control of the virus.

COVID-19 accelerated change within the UK retail market. It encouraged the growth of online shopping, providing the necessary demand for grocers to invest in their operations, and transformed the economics of their businesses. As innovative new business models emerged, some existing retailers collapsed leading to significant changes on the high street. Landlords were also affected. As some retail tenants struggled to pay their rents, other parts of the sector prospered and sought additional warehouse capacity to cope with rising demand. Not only does this illustrate how different parts of the retail sector faired during COVID-19, but it also demonstrates how the move online has resulted in the emergence of new opportunities.

The COVID-19 pandemic was particularly challenging for developing countries because of pre-existing poverty and severe inequality. Governments tended to set public safety as a primary goal, but it could not be their singular goal. Broadband was an important feature of any policy solution. Business lockdowns, school closures, and social distancing led to an unprecedented acceleration in the demand for broadband. But the government restrictions on social and economic interactions made it difficult to maintain and expand broadband networks. Governments might have let markets work out this challenge of escalating demand and increasing costs of supply, but few did. Governments quickly grew to believe that it would need cooperative relationships among multiple government agencies and private businesses to answer what appeared to be a broadband shortage. Regulatory controls over broadband providers were quickly suspended in favour of developing common goals and coordinated efforts. These approaches proved effective, although citizens continued to suffer from the pandemic.

COVID-19 has influenced the way we utilise the radio spectrum in terms of increasing data rates, the localisation of usage, and the transfer of traffic from urban to rural areas. Most regulators have shown sympathy towards operator requirements, stipulating a range of mitigation actions including allowing technology neutrality and temporary assignments. Internationally, the ITU-R suspended all physical meetings and launched a new global network resiliency platform named ‘REG4COVID’ to share experiences including those related to spectrum management.

It is argued in this chapter that the pandemic has supported the calls for additional unlicensed spectrum for Wi-Fi in the 6 GHz and accelerated the rollout of 5G. Moreover, despite of increasing use of streaming, it is quite difficult to assume that traditional linear TV will be replaced, at least in the near future for a variety of reasons. The pandemic has also raised the question as to whether an innovative assignment model could be used to assign the spectrum instead of auctions, and whether, in some countries where temporary assignments were made, frequencies are kept unutilised or reserved. Concerning international spectrum management, it is expected that WRC-23 will be held on time though there will be some implications for issues such as the regulatory time-limits for bringing into use satellite networks frequency assignments. Finally, it is argued that the pandemic has also demonstrated the importance of flexibility and agility in national spectrum management, and placed spectrum managers in a new position where they were forced to be proactive instead of their traditional reactive role.

The COVID-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to review net neutrality and the notion that bright light rules are necessary to hold broadband providers from exercising market power. The 2015 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Open Internet Order asserted that broadband providers have the capability and incentive to harm their customers and third-party service providers. It imposed a set of rules to control broadband providers’ offers, prices, and traffic management. The 2017 FCC vacated all but the transparency provisions of the OIO, restoring the oversight of broadband to the FTC.

This paper offers a review of the evidence regarding the effects of net neutrality regulation, including an investigation of the incidence of violations, or lack thereof, during the 2020 pandemic in the United States. It provides a review of the net neutrality literature and the international research on broadband provider behaviour during COVID-19. The paper presents original research conducted with FCC and FTC reports and a survey of news stories. Brief reviews of federal data on network performance and broadband adoption provide additional context. Given the limited incidence of violations that could be uncovered for the period, the paper suggests why broadband providers behaved opposite to regulatory advocates’ predictions. Contrary to many policy assertions, broadband providers did not block or throttle service, nor did they increase prices arbitrarily or decrease quality. Broadband providers appeared to expand availability, lower broadband prices, and make more networks available, frequently without customer charge. The paper suggests how policy could be updated to reflect the actual behaviour of broadband providers.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated many organisations’ reliance on the Internet, with schools, companies, and government agencies, among other institutions, all shifting their operations online in a relatively short period of time. This sudden shift created opportunities for cybercriminals, as did the burden on the healthcare sector, the rush for unemployment benefits, and the desire for up-to-date information about outbreaks and health precautions. This chapter examines the trends in cybercrime during the COVID-19 pandemic that were spurred by these changes, as well as the mitigation measures implemented by government and private industry stakeholders to help protect critical infrastructure and online operations. It argues that the nature of cybercrime and the most common forms of criminal activity did not change substantially during the pandemic, but rather that criminals’ focus on whom to target and how to exploit evolving current events enabled them to wield existing criminal tools to greater effect, and potentially also at greater scale, though reliable statistics on the frequency and size of cybercrimes are scarce. Finally, the chapter considers how these trends in cybercrime forced private organisations and governments to undertake new cybersecurity measures and programs and whether the long-term effects of the pandemic might actually include stronger cybersecurity if these efforts continue past the end of the public health crisis.

The debate about tackling online misinformation and disinformation is not unique to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the health crisis has elevated the danger of misleading information circulated on social media. Labelled as ‘infodemic’, the problem of COVID-19-related misinformation and disinformation prompted governments and social media platforms around the globe to impose various speech restrictions. The public and private policy frameworks aiming to curb the spread of the infodemic were adopted in a state of emergency and without proper scrutiny. Yet, they are shaping the future of content regulation, possibly affecting freedom of speech and other democratic values for years to come. This chapter looks at the key problematic aspects of actions taken by governments and social media platforms to address COVID-19-related misinformation and disinformation and discusses the possible long-term effects of these measures.

Besides the widespread harm and dreadful impact COVID-19 has caused, it brought about change. Interpreting the pandemic as a ‘change agent’, it is possible to observe how it accelerated the use of digital technologies, facilitating the migration of many activities to the virtual sphere and thus changing the interaction between the physical and virtual worlds. Although the pandemic accelerated the diffusion and adoption of digital technologies, allowing many to avoid or reduce the harms caused by the pandemic, not everyone benefitted to the same extent. The pandemic exacerbated existing digital divides while creating new ones, simultaneously elevating important policy debates regarding digital infrastructure and inclusion policies.