| dc.description.abstract | Norway's response to the Coronavirus pandemic was to initiate a lockdown. With Lockdown measures in place, the population was advised to work from home and use the internet for office work, meetings, lectures, conferences, studying and leisure activities. This study aims to determine how much change the Internet experienced during the Coronavirus pandemic in Norway. It investigates the performance of the Internet exploring performance metrics speed and latency during the pandemic in comparison to the previous years. In this context, performance is simply described as the a network's ability to do what it was designed to do.
To test the hypothesis that the Internet experienced certain changes during the pandemic, a mixed method research was used to analyse mobile and web browser speed test results collected by Nettfart from the year 2012 and responses from an online survey distributed to the population who lived in Norway before and during the pandemic. Speed test results gave information about upload and download speed and latency of users' network. For the survey, respondents were asked to share their user experience with internet quality and rate the Internet performance before and during the pandemic and finally, why users performed speed tests. The results showed that the origin of traffic changed from business or office areas to more residential areas as hypothesized. Analysing data from the year 2012 to 2021, the study results revealed that average upload and download speed got better as the years went by whiles latency performance did not change significantly. However, there was a great increase in the number of speed tests following the lockdown in March 2020 and the study reveals it was as a result of network quality change.
These results indicates that during the pandemic year, users experienced Internet quality issues in one way or the other. These network quality issues were not as a result of internet speed or latency changes as the pandemic did not have any significant influence on these metrics. | |
