The Government Accountability Office — Washington's rough equivalent to Canada's Office of the Auditor General — gave itself what you might think is an esoteric question: If a global pandemic like the H1N1 flu forces a whole pile of to stay home and telecommute using our home Internet services, could the Internet handle the extra traffic and, more importantly, could financial markets continue to function given their dependency on the availability of plenty of bandwidth?
The answer: Yes and no. The Department of Homeland Security has not, in fact, developed a backup plan to make sure federal government agencies can continue to function if everyone is telecommuting. But, you'll be happy to know that GAO believes we will be able to trade stocks and bonds on Wall Street if we all stayed home and tried to play day trader.
The full report is here [http://www.gao.gov/cgi-bin/getrpt?GAO-10-8 PDF] Among other things, the GAO says that the U.S. DHS should have a public relations campaign ready to go to tell people to lay off the non-essential Internet use. (All right you, no more downloading Brazilian volleyball pictures; weve got stocks to trade!)
This is no small matter. As the GAO report points out:
A functioning Internet will be important during a pandemic because it could be one important way that governments and private entities share necessary information with the public. Using the Internet to allow people to communicate effectively without coming together physically would assist in creating “social distance” to reduce the potential for illness to further spread.
but …
…this additional pandemic-related traffic is likely to exceed the capacity of Internet providers’ network infrastructure in metropolitan residential Internet access networks.