Three Internet Things That Could, But Didn’t Go Wrong in the Pandemic

A self-described former “internet plumber,” worried about three things that could bring the internet to its knees and make the pandemic even more disruptive than it had already been.

For starters, while he knew that network architects tend to overbuild to absorb unanticipated spikes in demand, he wasn’t sure how much they had overbuilt, and whether it would be enough to handle the massive change in global traffic patterns. It was.

“I thought it might only be 10 percent; it turned out it was more like 25 to 40 percent,” he told DCK in a recent interview for the Data Center Podcast (scroll down to stream, download, or read the transcript).

Now CEO of Kentik, a startup he founded to give people who build and manage networks modern tools for the job, Freedman has watched the internet grow up from the front row over a span of several decades. He was one of the key architects who built the infrastructure of Akamai, one of the world’s largest CDN providers; ran technology strategy of the bare-metal cloud provider ServerCentral as CTO; built, ran, and later sold a global Usenet provider called Readnews; and created Philadelphia’s first ISP in his basement.

The internet handled the pandemic just fine, and while it didn’t go completely without hiccups, there was nothing that approached the kind of disruptions that were the norm in the nineties, Freedman likes to say.

With extra capacity apparently aplenty in the world’s networks, his second concern at the start of the crisis was whether supply chains for infrastructure components could handle its global and ongoing nature. Typical disaster recovery modeling exercises anticipate issues that are temporary and limited to specific geographic areas.

Freedman wasn’t sure most operators’ DR scenarios prepared them for “this patchwork up-down, up-down,” he said. “With these interconnected supply chains, will you get your optics? Will you get your line cards? Will you get your routers and switches?”

As DCK has reported, supply chains, which worried many across the industry, held up. Delayed shipments did become commonplace for some time, but most companies appear to have adapted their planning to the longer equipment lead times.

“Supply chains have definitely gone up this year but not as much as feared"

Finally, he worried that cyber-criminals would take the opportunity to attack network infrastructure more vigorously, since the shift to remote work made corporate networks more vulnerable.

“I think the reason we haven’t seen this is because the criminals make money over the infrastructure,” he said. “You could take the infrastructure down while it’s being more vulnerable with all this activity, but I just think the incentive has not been there. As the whole world moves digital, so do the criminals.”