ANT Covid-WFH World Map

About the ANT COVID-19 Work-from-Home World Map

The COVID-19 Work-from-Home World Map is an interactive website that allows one to browse fluctuations in Internet usage from 2020-01-01 to 2020-06-30.

Our Covid-WFH map is based on data from our Covid-WFH Detection algorithms based on active scans of the IPv4 Internet. We look for change-sensitive blocks that show a daily (diurnal) swing indicating the workday, then detect that swing going away as an indication of Covid-WFH.

About the map

On this map, the world is divided into grid cells a given latitude and longitude. Many grid-cells show circles with Covid-WFH donw-trends. Circle area shows how many networks (each an IPv4 /24) are experiencing a down-trend. Color shows what percent are experiencing a down-trend (scale at left), as a fraction of all change-senstive blocks.

On the map, you can:

  • select date (top left)
  • play, step or pause (the top-center “play” triangle)

Drill-down for more information

The Covid-WFH map also supports drill-down. Click on any circle and it will display more information in a pop-up box.

Each pop-up shows details with the exact number of down-trend blocks and the percentage, as well as the latitude and longitude of the center of the grid cell.

Pop-ups start showing a sparkline of downtrends over time. By default the sparkline covers 6 months of data. Move the mouse over the sparkline to see the values on different dates, or click on a date to time-warp to it.

A second tab in the pop-up shows ISP information, with which ISPs showed a down-trend on the current data.

How Does It Work?

Our Covid-WFH map is based on data from our Covid-WFH Detection algorithms as described in our technical report: [1]

  • Xiao Song and John Heidemann 2021. Measuring the Internet during Covid-19 to Evaluate Work-from-Home. Technical Report arXiv:2102.07433v4 [cs.NI]. USC/ISI. [PDF] Details

Thanks

Our Covid-WFH map was supported by:

  • the National Science Foundation via award NSF-2028279 (MINCEQ, for visualization support in repsonse to hurricanes and natural disasters
  • a 2021 USC Zumberge award for understanding Covid-19-WFH
  • Erica Stutz’ work was supported through a USC/ISI Research Experience for Undergraduates program (NSF grant 2051101, PI: Jelena Mirkovich).
  • it builds on our prior outage world map supported by a 2017 Michale Keston research grant and the Department of Homeland Security.
  • it uses data collecter from the USC-run pingers, hosted at:
  • we also thank nearly all of the IPv4 Internet that is willing to accept our pings

If your particular network is not in our outage system, then either someone has requested to opt-out, or you do not have enough ping-responsive hosts. You can check how many ping-responsive hosts we see by plugging your IPv4 address into the IP address box (in the top right) on our Internet IPv4 Address Browser.

All of our data and our COVID-19 Work-from-Home Worldmap Browser is Copyright © 2020–2021 by the Unversity of Southern California. (We do share outage data with researchers as described above.) The data is collected in the ANT Lab by Yuri Pradkin.

Our COVID-19 Work-from-Home World Map uses the SlippyMap from OpenStreetMap, with signficant custom modifications by Domink Staros.

The mapping data is Copyright © by the Open Street Map Contributors. It is licensed under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL), by the OpenStreetMap Foundation (OSMF).

The tiles in our COVID-19 Work-from-Home World Map use the Carto Dark (“Dark Matter”) and Carto Light (“Positron”) tilesets. These tilesets are by Carto, used under a CC-BY-3.0 license.