Behind the scenes with Verizon: Network reliability during the pandemic

The proactive response from the telecommunications industry worldwide has ensured that friends, family and professionals around the world remain connected and entertained in the face of the Covid-19 health pandemic. On January 7, TM Forum’s Chief Analyst Mark Newman led a webinar in which participants from Verizon and OmniSci reviewed what Verizon has been doing behind the scenes before and during the pandemic to keep its networks up and running and to respond to significant, unexpected changes in traffic flows and volumes.

Usage shifts

There were a number of important changes in traffic flows during March and April 2020 when Covid-19 arrived in the United States and people moved into lockdown, according to Paul Kerl, a senior manager for business analytics in Verizon’s network traffic function:

• Upward trends in collaboration tool usage and VPN usage.


• A notable increase in call volume, and then a sustained increase in minutes of use driven in part by increased work from home conference calls and meetings that would have traditionally been in person.”


• Increases in gaming traffic and video traffic with stay-at-home orders alongside “a shift in entertainment consumption to at home options.” (see table below).

Adjusted retail patterns

Changes in consumer behavior are highly palpable in the retail industry. Kerl noted that with the help of data from the National Retail Federation, looking particularly at the top 20 retailers, these retailers’ website traffic on Thanksgiving Day was up 560% from the previous year, while Black Friday to Cyber Monday saw an increase in 200% in online traffic form the previous year. Video conferencing services on Thanksgiving Day also increased 31 times compared to previous year with more people communicating with their family, relatives and friends virtually.

Michael Raj, Executive Director of AI & Data Enablement at Verizon added: “People were hesitant to step out and a lot of Thanksgiving sales were moved online as well…that definitely impacted the mobility patterns around stores.”

On the move, or not

Through a partnership with OmniSci, an accelerated analytics platform, Verizon was able to track changes in traffic flows across its mobile networks in near real time. This enabled Verizon to identify pain points in the networks and to allocate investments and resources to boost network capacity on a base station by base station basis. Verizon was also able to predict where future problems may occur. “We use this dataset to forecast when we think mobility will go back to normal and when we think certain areas will experience more usage again” explained Sunil John, Distinguished Member – Predictive/Prescriptive Analytics at Verizon.

Verizon was also able to concisely map mobility patterns across the US, aligning behaviours to the various lockdowns and predicting future traffic so as to be able to adjust accordingly (see the video below).

A good example of where Verizon was able to boost its network capacity was the Providence St. Vincent Medical Centre in Oregon which saw traffic levels surge as a result of Covid-19 hospitalizations. “There were unfortunately a lot of hospitalizations, so we wanted to ensure that there was additional capacity in places like hospitals to meet the expected demand there,” John said.

Built for robustness

Raj referenced the robustness of the Verizon network which was able to manage the surges and changes in traffic flows. Verizon was also able to take advantage of the additional capacity allocated by the FCC to help operators manage traffic during the pandemic.

Verizon also followed developments in other countries and how operators responded to the pandemic and lockdown. Raj said: “In Japan and Korea, the telco providers were looking more closely at pockets of traffic that were [changing] in different parts of the country, and they were trying to address that. Australia, we heard that there was a big rural versus urban market shift

“As we learned more from the telco providers across the other countries, it enabled us to be more successful in addressing the demands that was coming from our customers during the pandemic.”

Learn more about how Verizon’s consistent investment and continuous deployments of the latest technology led to strong performance when customers needed it most. Watch the webinar for the full insight here