14 May 2020

Veego Software, an Israel-based startup that monitors the experience of internet users in the connected home, said it has identified trends in the problems that people are facing during the coronavirus-driven upsurge in home internet usage.

Using data drawn from European countries and Israel, Veego Labs compared user-experience trends from just before these countries entered into wide-scale lockdowns with usage data garnered through the middle of April.

The company noted a surge in user-experience problems such as unacceptable lags in freezing of screens during video conferencing. The main reasons behind these problems include network congestion - reduced quality of service that occurs when a network node is called on to carry more data than it can handle - and latency higher than 100 milliseconds, especially noticeable by users of low-latency applications

“Since the coronavirus outbreak earlier in the year, a flood of news sources testify daily to the rise in the use of video conferencing and other internet services in the home,” said Denis Sirov, Veego CTO. “Upon gathering considerable intelligence from Veego Agents residing in home routers, we are able to analyse the trends in problems that users are facing as they consume more and more internet services. Connectivity failures occurred primarily because people in corona-induced isolation within the home are trying to reach their internet router from remote rooms where they haven’t used connected devices before. Sometimes, these rooms do not receive a good, consistent WiFi signal.”

WAN problems emanating from infrastructure deficiencies along with cloud-service problems also contributed to downgraded user experience.