They've seen a 35-60% increase in daytime traffic, but it's still only half of what they're seeing in the evenings and nowhere near their network capacity.
I'm not saying that it isn't reasonable to lower streaming quality (a luxury item) at a time when the internet has become an even more critical link in our well-being - be that economic, social, or even physical as information on the physical danger gets transmitted over it. It's also reasonable to guess that there are a lot of people at home streaming content mid-day. However, the data seems to indicate that while daytime usage is up, it's still well below evening peaks and the increase in traffic isn't as huge as many people are probably thinking.
BT may claim it is nowhere near their capacity but everybody on my team has seen really noticeably degradation in home internet performance over the last couple of weeks (this includes people who work from home daily).
And which home internet is that? - or have your co-workers brought from one of the cheaper providers.
That is assuming the bottle neck is not caused by wifi - if there are others using the wifi spectrum kids partner, neighbours etc - that could explain it
Lots of companies do, and have had to quickly buy new license, and are finding out they don't have the network capacity to handle all their employees working from home.
They've seen a 35-60% increase in daytime traffic, but it's still only half of what they're seeing in the evenings and nowhere near their network capacity.
AT&T has noted that their network traffic is up only 27% (https://about.att.com/pages/COVID-19.html).
I'm not saying that it isn't reasonable to lower streaming quality (a luxury item) at a time when the internet has become an even more critical link in our well-being - be that economic, social, or even physical as information on the physical danger gets transmitted over it. It's also reasonable to guess that there are a lot of people at home streaming content mid-day. However, the data seems to indicate that while daytime usage is up, it's still well below evening peaks and the increase in traffic isn't as huge as many people are probably thinking.