Page 19 - Kaleidoscope Academic Conference Proceedings 2020

AN ACCELERATED DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION, COURTESY

OF THE RECENT PANDEMIC

Roberto Saracco

Future Directions Committee - IEEE, Italy

The recent pandemic has forced many industries to shift a significant portion of their business to
cyberspace. Of course it has been much more than this, with people getting acquainted with using
cyberspace and their new everyday reality. This, in a way, has been even more significant, because it
has contributed to a change of habits and culture. In Italy, as an example, the government has tried
for almost a decade to convince people to acquire a digital identity known as the Sistema Pubblico di
Identità Digitale, SPID, which is certified by the state and which allows them to access a variety of
e-government services. The results have been discouraging. Over several years just 4 million people
(out of 60 million) obtained their SPID and a small number of these used it so rarely that in many
cases it expired. Because of the lockdown and the need to be authenticated online to access services
(and, most crucially, to get subsidies covering the loss of income) there has been a large adoption of
SPID, with a 100% increase in just two weeks.

It was not just about people being forced to do so, it was also about people choosing the online options
over the world of atoms. e-Commerce has increased many folds with people choosing to provision
everything from groceries to masks online.

Hence, overall we saw an "unexpected" success in terms of people and activities that moved to
cyberspace in a matter of days.

Another important aspect was the fact that industries and people could shift to cyberspace.
To me this was thanks to two main factors:

• the pervasiveness and capacity of the telecommunication infrastructure
• the availability of terminals (smartphones, crucial for the layperson, and laptops which were
indispensable for workers) and the fact that they were already part of people’s habits.

The telecommunication infrastructure proved to be extremely resilient and capable of accommodating
the sharp increase in traffic.

In Italy, the traffic grew in just a few days by 80% and then stabilized (actually we are seeing now a
slight decrease, mostly due to the fact that people are using the infrastructure for work and less for
Netflix). Looking at the Italian traffic, mobile communications grew by 30% (peak 44%), instant
messaging doubled, video communications increased by 8 times, streaming 50% (peak 89%).

At the same time the network operators were able to double their backbone capacity and increase
their PoP and content servers in a matter of a few days. TIM, one of the Italian Operators added 4Tbps
of capacity.
It was clear from the traffic usage and content access that the last mile didn’t have a problem (where
it was available!) At the same time it became clear the importance of having VDSL/FTTH and the
disadvantage for people living in areas not yet covered). The problems were on the backbones (but
they were promptly upgraded) and on the servers (here the problems took a longer time to be
addressed). Also, there was an increased usage of the big cloud providers, Amazon, Google, IBM,
and Microsoft, that saw not just additional demand but also were asked to take over the storage and

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