The Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a report (PDF format) which concluded that 40% of workers who stay at home because of sickness from a flu pandemic would cause severe Internet congestion.  The GAO predicts that congestion could be bad enough to require ISPs to block popular websites to make room for commerce.  But there are several problems with these alarmist conclusions.

For one thing, the assumption that just 40% of the work force staying home would cause severe congestion is fundamentally flawed.  One only needs to consider what happens between the hours of 4:00 PM to 11:00 PM when most (far greater than 40%) of the workforce is home and nearly all of the school children are home using the Internet.  We know from statistical data that this is when residential Internet usage peaks, so why would the day time usage during a hypothetical pandemic be worse when fewer than half the workforce and school children are home?

Another problem with the report is that it assumes that websites, online gaming, and telecomuting are big bandwidth consumers when the reality is just the opposite.  The vast majority of websites, nearly all telecomuting, and all online games are low bandwidth applications.  Most websites require a short and quick burst of bandwidth while the webpage loads but spends the majority of time idle on the Internet as the user reads the content.

Even most YouTube video streaming, while huge compared to normal web surfing is only 320 Kbps to 640 Kbps with the exception of the 720P video content which requires 2.25 Mbps.  But even that doesn’t compare to P2P bulk file transfer applications which grab and sustain the maximum amount of bandwidth available.  Corporate remote access solutions are tuned to use the least amount of bandwidth so that they can be simultaneously used by hundreds of users without overloading the corporate central data center, and many businesses continue to share 1.554 T1 Internet connections with 20 to 50 users.  Online game play is almost always less than a 100 Kbps load but it is a common myth that it is high bandwidth application.  The downloading of patches or new games fall under the category of bulk file transfer but this doesn’t occur on most days for most gamers.

Even if extreme congestion was occurring, the correct course of action is to use reasonable discrimination using the universally accepted and fair method of prioritization where low bandwidth applications are always granted higher priority over high bandwidth applications.  The same rationale holds for giving priority to broadband subscribers who use little bandwidth over subscribers using high amounts of bandwidth and Comcast is already using such a system with the FCC’s blessing.  Even Comcast’s old system which used TCP resets to prune excessive BitTorrent seeders (dedicated BitTorrent servers) is a lighter touch than what the GAO is suggesting.  But even with all of this prior experience and knowledge, it is strange that the GAO would conclude that draconian measures such as blocking recreational applications is necessary.  Perhaps the lesson that can be gleaned from this is that the private sector and the engineers who designed, built, and maintain the network are the best ones to figure out how to reasonably manage network congestion.