A Characterization of the COVID-19 Pandemic Impact on a Mobile Network Operator Traffic

Abstract

During early 2020, the SARS-CoV-2 virus rapidly spread worldwide, forcing many governments to impose strict lockdown measures to tackle the pandemic. This significantly changed people's mobility and habits, subsequently impacting how they use telecommunication networks. In this paper, we investigate the effects of the COVID-19 emergency on a UK Mobile Network Operator (MNO). We quantify the changes in users' mobility and investigate how this impacted the cellular network usage and performance. Our analysis spans from the entire country to specific regions, and geodemographic area clusters. We also provide a detailed analysis for London. Our findings bring insights at different geotemporal granularity on the status of the cellular network, from the decrease in data traffic volume in the cellular network and lower load on the radio network, counterposed to a surge in the conversational voice traffic volume.

Characterizing Service Provider Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic in the United States

“…For wireless networks in the US, volume increases of up to 12.2% for voice and 28.4% for data by the top four providers were shown in an industry report [6]. Mobile networks in the UK reported roughly 25% drops in downlink data traffic volume [16]. Industry operators have self-reported on their network responses largely through blog posts [1,5,14,17].…”

“…In Europe, Internet exchange points saw a 15-20% increase in overall traffic volumes [3], in some cases resulting in peaks in round trip latency in some countries (e.g., Italy) that were approximately 30% higher than normal [12]. For cellular networks in the UK [16], because users were less mobile, downlink traffic volume decreased by up to 25%. While some of the characteristics of shifting traffic demands are known, and certain aspects of the Internet's resilience in the face of the traffic shifts are undoubtedly a result of robust design of the network and protocols, some aspects of the Internet's resilience are a direct result of providers' swift responses to these changing traffic patterns.…”

COVID-19 Borescope: uma ferramenta intuitiva, escalável e flexível para compreender e correlacionar padrões de mobilidade da população e casos de infecção

“…Devido à natureza recente da pandemia, há um número limitado de trabalhos que examinam o impacto da pandemia em diferentes aspectos, em especial aspectos ligados à mobilidade, ao tráfego de Internet e da rede celular. O trabalho [9] apresenta uma caracterização do impacto do COVID-19 no tráfego da operadora de rede móvel e analisa as mudanças causadas pela pandemia. Feldman et al [5] analisa o tráfego da Internet durante a pandemia do COVID-19 e conclui que o volume geral de tráfego aumenta em 15-20% uma semana após o lockdown.…”

“…Porém, uma das características mais importantes da ferramenta é a sua flexibilidade. O pós-processamento, por exemplo, é feito através de chamadas externas ao NginX, através de scripts implementados na linguagem Lua 9 . Isso permite que novas funções de pós-processamento sejam adicionadas à ferramenta ou substituam as já existentes, simplesmente alterando os scripts.…”

Electricity Consumption of Singaporean Households Reveals Proactive Citizen Response to COVID-19 Progression

“…By determining the time spent by people at their homes and outside (e.g., in workplaces, shops, etc.) and analyzing how these behaviors change over time, recent studies [4,5,[15][16][17][18] have attempted to discern the social response and design targeted interventions. However, this approach suffers from limitations as well: (i) contact-tracing apps may not be used by many phone users, especially at the early stages of the pandemic; (ii) individuals could own more than one mobile phone, or multiple individuals may share a phone; (iii) demographic differences in phone usage exist, with groups such as children and the elderly potentially under-represented.…”