How is the COVID-19 emergency in Italy affecting network traffic? The first effect of the boom in online classes offered by the Italian universities was to reverse the direction of network traffic.

Uploads now often outweigh downloads and the quality of the connection is not affected by this new pattern: this is the advantage of having a symmetrical network.

All Italian universities are coping with the difficult task of reorganising the teaching activities during the emergency lockdown, but they were prepared for this, thanks to the presence of expert personnel and high-performance digital infrastructures. The huge numbers of students accessing live streaming classes and other learning materials from home generated a hike in the upload traffic on GARR backbone of 60% compared to the yearly average.

Some of the universities registered especially impressive statistics Polytechnic of Turin (+183% in upload traffic compared to yearly average, with peaks of over 3 Gbps), University of Milan (+185%), University of Siena (+231%), University of Trieste (+185%), followed by Universities of Turin, Florence, Verona, Padua, Palermo, Parma, Pisa and Cattolica di Milan.