Coronavirus crunch may expose weakness in your broadband plan: much slower upload speeds

Binge-watching in high-def isn’t an act of irresponsibility in a moment of crisis. “The internet as a whole is fine,” agrees Doug Suttles, CEO of the bandwidth-measurement firm Ookla. “It can handle a ton.”  Coronavirus-induced traffic during the day still doesn’t exceed the nightly peaks your internet provider should have already designed its systems around. But Suttles notes that the coronavirus crunch may expose a weakness in your own broadband service plan: upload speeds much slower than your downloads. That’s the usual state of affairs on cable internet, the most widely used sort of broadband in the US, but it’s also common at already-slow, phone-based DSL service. Those providers rarely advertise how their uploads can be less than a tenth of their downloads. But extended time on Zoom and other video-conferencing services will make that painfully plain. Warns Shuttles: “At the home, that bottleneck will get hit really quickly.” Although it may be somewhat reassuring to realize that the congestion that some people are seeing is not network congestion, that’s also a problem you probably can’t fix without moving to someplace served by one or more fiber providers. And for many Americans, that’s an upgrade as far off as a coronavirus vaccine.