KPN is preparing for new peaks in the network

KPN is preparing for new peaks in the network now that, as of Wednesday, schools will close again for an extended period and the Netherlands will be inside again en masse, working from home and following online education. This will make the KPN network much busier again and the records set last March will probably be broken, as people can be found inside much more at this time of year compared to the spring.

“Especially at the start of the corona outbreak, we saw a significant increase in the use of our network. In fact, consumers’ broadband connection became their business connection,” says Paul Slot, responsible for KPN’s infrastructure. “We will continue to do everything we can in the coming period too, to provide our customers with the best possible services. We can handle the increase in traffic in terms of capacity and we can build on the experiences from last spring. For example, just as with the first lockdown, we will keep the changes in the network to a minimum.”

Designed to handle peaks
“KPN’s network is well-equipped to handle peaks, which usually occur in the evenings and at the weekends, when people are at home and watching TV or streaming Netflix and Amazon Prime videos,” said Slot. “Now, it is constantly busy on our network and on some days you even see that it is just as busy during the day as it is in the evening or at the weekend. We suspect that this will increase further in the days ahead. In the coming days, we will closely monitor our network and watch the impact of the tightened measures. With one difference from the last time when this happened to everyone; we have already gained some experience of this situation.”

Sawtooth
Traffic has been a lot higher since the outbreak of COVID-19, as the Netherlands has been working from home en masse ever since. According to Paul Slot, more and more companies and employees have started seeing applications such as Zoom as commonplace. “We have seen clear home-working patterns in our outgoing internet traffic in recent weeks. A ‘sawtooth’ becomes visible, because a new peak occurs every half hour and on the hour when the Netherlands starts a video call en masse. More work will probably be done from home as of tomorrow, but many people will also be free during the Christmas period,” Slot suspects.

Clear home-working pattern visible in outgoing KPN internet traffic in recent months. Sawtooth on Monday, 23 November. The dotted line shows the pattern for a ‘normal’ Monday, before COVID-19.

New Year: shift from mobile to fixed network
Christmas usually means 'normal days' on the network. That could be different this year as more ‘digital’ meetings take place. New Year is traditionally one of the busiest moments of the year for KPN, especially on the mobile network. Then, the Netherlands wishes each other en masse a Happy New Year and this has invariably led to data records in recent years. Last New Year, more than eight times as much data was used compared to five years ago. In all likelihood, no mobile network records will be broken this year. But given that many more people will be at home, Slot believes that this could cause unprecedented peaks on the fixed network: “We’re focusing on this, so that even with the limitations surrounding corona in the Netherlands, we put the old year behind us and wish each other a Happy New Year.”