Thing is, ISPs in the UK (including mine) are saying that typical evening use is 10-20x typical daytime use, so the uptick in remote working isn't actually an issue for them at all.
So remote working during daytime might not be an issue, but increased recreational use of internet in the evening might be. (I'm just speculating here, haven't seen anything from the ISPs about this)
They've seen a 35-60% increase in daytime traffic, but it's still only half of what they're seeing in the evenings and nowhere near their network capacity.
AT&T has noted that their network traffic is up only 27% (https://about.att.com/pages/COVID-19.html).
I'm not saying that it isn't reasonable to lower streaming quality (a luxury item) at a time when the internet has become an even more critical link in our well-being - be that economic, social, or even physical as information on the physical danger gets transmitted over it. It's also reasonable to guess that there are a lot of people at home streaming content mid-day. However, the data seems to indicate that while daytime usage is up, it's still well below evening peaks and the increase in traffic isn't as huge as many people are probably thinking.
That is assuming the bottle neck is not caused by wifi - if there are others using the wifi spectrum kids partner, neighbours etc - that could explain it
Lots of companies do, and have had to quickly buy new license, and are finding out they don't have the network capacity to handle all their employees working from home.
FWIW, my ping seems to have more than doubled to about 30 ms while download and upload speed seems unaffected but i'm with VM
[0]: https://www.de-cix.net/en/locations/germany/frankfurt/statis...