I am excited to announce the public re-launch of the Interconnection Measurement Project at the University of Chicago’s Data Science Institute (DSI). The Interconnection Measurement Project is a collaboration of academia with Charter, Comcast, Cox, and Mediacom — major Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in the United States — that enables network insights through a unique and unprecedented data set showing network capacity and utilization at the junctures where Internet traffic routes between networks – or interconnection points. Over five years ago, I first released a novel analysis of Internet utilization taken from direct measurement of Internet interconnection points and launched a prior iteration of the Interconnection Measurement Project. That research was born from a cooperative effort started at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University to collect aggregated and anonymized capacity and utilization data at the network interconnection points. Participating ISPs have continued to collect the interconnection link data and I am pleased to release an updated analysis of that data.
The data reveals that interconnect capacity is roughly 31% utilized during peak periods, and that ISPs continue to increase capacity to stay well ahead of traffic growth. Today’s release provides for the period from January 2019 through June 2021. The approximately 2900 individual interconnection links included in the data set provide a comprehensive view into the interconnects of the participating ISPs. Across all interconnects in the data set, capacity remained at less than half utilized during peak periods. During the 27-month period published, capacity has grown more than 50 percent cumulatively. Usage is also growing, though at a more variable rate on a month-to-month basis. This is likely influenced by several factors, such as increased usage of Internet video over the winter holidays and increasing remote work and school arrangements.
Starting in mid-March of 2020, the United States experienced a sudden surge in Internet usage driven by the widespread COVID-19 stay-at-home orders that caused many of us to switch to working and studying at home in a matter of days. The Interconnection Measurement Project data provides a new lens to understand how broadband networks handled that wave of unexpected traffic and shows that even during peak demand periods, networks were able to handle the increased demand with significant excess interconnect capacity available. Figure 1 shows this spike in aggregate utilization beginning in March 2020 and the subsequent decline in utilization of total capacity as ISPs rapidly augmented their networks to stay ahead of the new traffic demands. Remarkably, throughout the COVID-19 driven spike in usage, total aggregate utilization remained below 47% of available capacity.
The participating ISPs provide direct measurement data of the capacity and utilization of interconnection links throughout their service territories on a five-minute basis. The data makes clear that the network operators quickly adapted their interconnects to meet user demand. Further segmentation and analysis of the data is available on the Interconnection Measurement Project website, which will be regularly refreshed to provide a dynamic picture of how the Internet is evolving.
Measuring the performance of broadband networks is an important area of research, with major implications for consumers who increasingly rely on their broadband connection for education, work, and healthcare, alongside entertainment and social applications. Before the creation of this project, measurement efforts were primarily designed to characterize access network performance and largely depended on data collected from endpoint devices. While understanding the performance and usage of the endpoints is an important part of the story, the user’s experience also relies on factors upstream of ISP access networks, which is why measuring interconnection capacity and utilization is important to understanding Internet performance and end user experience holistically.
I am excited to provide this unique view into the nation’s broadband networks capacity and utilization again publicly. It is in consumer’s interest to advance this field of research in a rigorous and thoughtful way and the re-launch of this project is an important step.