![]() ![]() For the most part, it doesn’t get out of a Harvard-controlled 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’s going to be going through. At Harvard, we have a fairly sophisticated network. WALDO:It’s not so much going through different equipment as it is going through a lot more stuff. GAZETTE: 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’s is it going through different equipment? So that’s why I don’t worry, but I do think this is an interesting experiment.” “One of the miraculous things about the internet is how well it has scaled up. But I don’t think we have ever stress-tested it on the scale that we are going to over the next couple of weeks. And the internet is built to deal with those kinds of problems. WALDO: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 was always built to be sort of reliably crummy. Now we are going to stress-test it in a way it has never been before. 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. I actually look at this as a very interesting experiment. WALDO:Zoom may be the only company that is having that experience, but maybe some of the network vendors are seeing an uptick. 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. GAZETTE: I’ve heard that in addition to this being a nationwide crisis - one that touches us here on campus - there’s also opportunity. 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. 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. We did not have creations like Canvas that allow us to do things in the classroom that older systems didn’t allow us to do. 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. Ten years ago, I don’t think it would have been. 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. GAZETTE: Are we better prepared technologically than we might have been 10 years ago for this sort of a shift to remote work? ![]() 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. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, professor of the practice of computer science there, and professor of technology policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. ![]() To understand the issues in play, the Gazette spoke with Jim Waldo, chief technology officer for the Harvard John A. 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. This is part of our Coronavirus Update 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. ![]()
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