COVID-19 on the internet: traffic and stay-at-home orders

COVID-19 has significantly increased the usage of the internet for everything from Zoom classes to entertainment. Using a detailed, day-by-day measurement dataset collected by the Federal Communications Commission and going back multiple years, we are investigating questions such as: How much did the internet slow down during the height of the pandemic in different regions? Can we observe the impact of stay-at-home orders on the internet and thus observe how well they were followed? Did the reliability of the internet suffer? We are using cloud-based analysis techniques to look for answers, with a publication slated for a telecommunication policy conference in December 2020.