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The digital divide—and, in particular, the homework gap— have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, laying bare not only the inequities in broadband Internet access but also how these inequities ultimately affect citizens’ ability to learn, work, and play. Addressing these inequities ultimately requires having holistic, “full stack” data on the nature of the gaps in infrastructure and uptake—from the physical infrastructure (e.g., fiber, cable) to speed and application performance to affordability and neighborhood effects that ultimately affect whether a technology is adopted. This paper surveys how various existing datasets can (and cannot) shed light on these gaps, the limitations of these datasets, what we know from existing data about how the Internet responded to shifts in traffic during COVID-19, and—importantly for the future—what data we need to better understand these problems moving forward and how the research community, policymakers, and the public might gain access to various data. Keywords: digital divide,iInternet, mapping, performance 

During the early weeks and months of the COVID-19 pandemic, significant changes to Internet usage occurred as a result of a sudden global shift to people working, studying and quarantining at home. One aspect that this affected was interconnection between networks, which this paper studies. This paper explores some of the effects of these changes on Internet interconnection points, in terms of utilization, traffic ratios, and other performance characteristics such as latency. 

Abstract. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in dramatic changes to the daily habits of billions of people. Users increasingly have to rely on home broadband Internet access for work, education, and other activities. These changes have resulted in corresponding changes to Internet traffic patterns. This paper aims to characterize the effects of these changes with respect to Internet service providers in the United States. We study three questions: (1) How did traffic demands change in the United States as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic?; (2) What effects have these changes had on Internet performance?; (3) How did service providers respond to these changes? We study these questions using data from a diverse collection of sources. Our analysis of interconnection data for two large ISPs in the United States shows a 30–60% increase in peak traffic rates in the first quarter of 2020. In particular, we observe traffic downstream peak volumes for a major ISP increase of 13–20% while upstream peaks increased by more than 30%. Further, we observe significant variation in performance across ISPs in conjunction with the traffic volume shifts, with evident latency increases after stay-at-home orders were issued, followed by a stabilization of traffic after April. Finally, we observe that in response to changes in usage, ISPs have aggressively augmented capacity at interconnects, at more than twice the rate of normal capacity augmentation. Similarly, video conferencing applications have increased their network footprint, more than doubling their advertised IP address space