{"id":300348,"date":"2020-03-18T14:44:24","date_gmt":"2020-03-18T18:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/?p=300348"},"modified":"2023-11-08T20:23:21","modified_gmt":"2023-11-09T01:23:21","slug":"remote-work-will-stress-test-the-internet-and-parts-will-fail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.harvard.edu\/gazette\/story\/2020\/03\/remote-work-will-stress-test-the-internet-and-parts-will-fail\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018There will be cascading failures that get fixed on the fly\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\t\n\t
\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\tScience & Tech\t\t<\/a>\n\t\t\n\t\t

\n\t\t\u2018There will be cascading failures that get fixed on the fly\u2019\t<\/h1>\n\n\t\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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Anastasia Dulgier\/Unsplash<\/p><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\t

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\n\t\tAlvin Powell\t<\/p>\n\t\t\t

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\n\t\t\tHarvard\u2019s Waldo says the public flight to remote work will stress-test the internet \u2014 and some parts will need repair\t\t<\/h2>\n\t\t\n<\/header>\n\n\n\n
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This is part of our <\/em>Coronavirus Update<\/em><\/a> series in which Harvard specialists in epidemiology, infectious disease, economics, politics, and other disciplines offer insights into what the latest developments in the COVID-19 outbreak may bring.<\/em><\/p>\n

With offices across the country shuttered and workers being asked to work remotely when they can, the nation is relying on the robustness of the internet and technology infrastructure as never before. To understand the issues in play, the Gazette spoke with Jim Waldo<\/a>, chief technology officer for the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences<\/a>, professor of the practice of computer science there, and professor of technology policy at the Harvard Kennedy School<\/a>. Waldo, who spent three decades in the tech industry, discussed the likelihood that parts of the all-important internet will fail, and the equal likelihood that engineers will make repairs on the fly to keep people working.<\/p>\n

Q&A<\/h2>\n

Jim Waldo<\/h3>\n

GAZETTE:\u00a0 <\/strong><\/strong>Are we better prepared technologically than we might have been 10 years ago for this sort of a shift to remote work?<\/p>\n

WALDO:<\/strong> <\/strong>Oh, my goodness, yes. The ubiquity of the internet and the tools that have been built around it make this kind of shift at least possible to think of. Ten years ago, I don\u2019t think it would have been. We did not have applications like Zoom that allow fairly high-quality video conferencing and the recording of video and even audio conferencing at fairly compressed bandwidth. Then, that wasn\u2019t possible. We did not have creations like Canvas that allow us to do things in the classroom that older systems didn\u2019t allow us to do. Back then, we had webpages, and now we have a set of interactive tools that allows discussions to happen online, that allows the distribution of content in various ways, that allows us to run quizzes and exams. All of this has been made possible by changes made in recent years, both in the technology of networking in general and the way that we are using technology at Harvard.<\/p>\n

GAZETTE:\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong>I\u2019ve heard that in addition to this being a nationwide crisis \u2014 one that touches us here on campus \u2014 there\u2019s also opportunity. You hear about Zoom stock being up; perhaps, amid the damage, this shift will be beneficial to some of these companies and part of this industry.<\/p>\n

WALDO:<\/strong> <\/strong>Zoom may be the only company that is having that experience, but maybe some of the network vendors are seeing an uptick. I actually look at this as a very interesting experiment. We built the internet years years ago to handle the kind of traffic that researchers needed, and it has grown to be part of the fabric of everyday life. Now we are going to stress-test it in a way it has never been before. And the internet was always built to be sort of reliably crummy.<\/p>\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> <\/strong>Can you explain that?<\/p>\n

WALDO:<\/strong> <\/strong>Well, the internet is built on the notion that packets will get lost, that pieces of it will go out of service, that it can do adaptive routing, that bad things will happen in the network. And the internet is built to deal with those kinds of problems. But I don\u2019t think we have ever stress-tested it on the scale that we are going to over the next couple of weeks.<\/p>\n\r\n

“One of the miraculous things about the internet is how well it has scaled up. So that\u2019s why I don\u2019t worry, but I do think this is an interesting experiment.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\r\n\n

GAZETTE:\u00a0 <\/strong> <\/strong>How is the current situation, with so many people home, different from what happens when everyone is in the office? Is the traffic different? Is it more? I know the infrastructure here in my house is not as robust as Harvard\u2019s; is it going through different equipment?<\/p>\n

WALDO:<\/strong> <\/strong>It\u2019s not so much going through different equipment as it is going through a lot more stuff. At Harvard, we have a fairly sophisticated network. That keeps a lot of the traffic that is being sent from Harvard inside its network, where we know what the bandwidth constraints are, we know how many switches it\u2019s going to be going through. For the most part, it doesn\u2019t get out of a Harvard-controlled network. Now that everybody is at home \u2014 and home may be anywhere from Boston to China for some of our students \u2014 it is going via a much more complicated route and a much more varied set of equipment, and that\u2019s going to stress everything. This is going on for every other company as well.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not worried so much about the core of the internet; that\u2019s not going to change all that much. But that last mile \u2014 or in some cases that last 200 yards \u2014 between you and the major backbones of the internet are not built for the kind of stress that we have been putting on them over the last week. The internet itself was not built for any of the kinds of stresses that we\u2019re putting on it right now. One of the miraculous things about the internet is how well it has scaled up. So that\u2019s why I don\u2019t worry, but I do think this is an interesting experiment.<\/p>\n

GAZETTE:<\/strong> <\/strong>In real time, with fairly high stakes.<\/p>\n

WALDO:<\/strong> <\/strong>Well, yes. And sometimes when an experiment fails, it truly sucks, to use a technical term. But I think there are various ways we can think of adapting. We are starting off by saying, \u201cAll right, let\u2019s try running our classes on Zoom.\u201d Everybody has their video on, and you can look at people. Well, to ease bandwidth, it may be that we need to actually run our classes on Zoom with the video off, so it\u2019s more like a large-scale teleconference. I also think instructors are going to have to start thinking about how they design their courses for asynchronous attendance because not all your students are going to be online at the same time. They\u2019re in different time zones, in different places, and then maybe at endpoints that have different amounts of connectivity. Are they going to be watching on a laptop, on a tablet, or on a phone? That\u2019s going to require that we adapt the ways that we have traditionally taught.<\/p>\n

GAZETTE:\u00a0 <\/strong><\/strong>Have you been advising faculty? Have folks come to you and said, \u201cHow do we do this?\u201d<\/p>\n

WALDO:<\/strong> <\/strong>There are much better resources for that than me. The Bok Center<\/a> and the vice provost for advances in learning<\/a> have both put up really excellent sites. I\u2019ve noticed a lot of departmental sites where instructors are talking over how they can teach their particular subjects in different ways. We\u2019re all learning really rapidly, because we have to. Generally, designing a course \u2014 if you do it in a thoughtful fashion \u2014 takes somewhere between a couple of months and a semester, but we\u2019re all being asked to redesign our courses in thoughtful ways in a week.<\/p>\n

GAZETTE:\u00a0 <\/strong><\/strong>How have you redesigned your course? You mentioned that was part of what you\u2019re going to be doing this week.<\/p>\n

WALDO:<\/strong> <\/strong>Well, fortunately, the week is not over. But as I said before, I\u2019m looking at various ways we can deliver content in an asynchronous fashion rather than assuming that everybody is going to be online at the same time. The course I\u2019m teaching has around 65 people in it. We\u2019re looking at ways of breaking that up into smaller discussion groups that could be online. We plan on making heavy use of a couple of discussion forums that we already have connected into our Canvas site. And we\u2019ve already set up online office hours. We will adapt as we go along.<\/p>\n\r\n

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