The End of Winter Is the Internet’s Annual Stress Test

If your internet feels “off” toward the end of winter, you’re not imagining it.

Apps lag. Video calls pixelate. Streaming buffers at exactly the wrong moment. Nothing is technically “down,” yet everything feels slightly degraded.

There is a reason for that, and it has very little to do with your router.

The Internet Is Infrastructure, Not Magic

We talk about the internet as if it lives in the sky. In reality, it runs through fiber buried under streets and cables stretched across the ocean floors. More than 1.4 million kilometres of subsea cable carry global traffic every day.

The cold season is unforgiving to physical systems. Rough seas damage subsea cables. Low temperatures affect terrestrial fiber. Repair vessels are delayed. Maintenance postponed during the holiday period suddenly gets scheduled at once.

The network keeps operating, but with less margin for error.

Why Nothing Fails — Yet Performance Slips

Modern backbone networks are built with redundancy. When a cable is cut or a route is disrupted, traffic automatically reroutes. Your service survives, but the path your data takes may become longer and more congested.

Imagine diverting motorway traffic onto secondary roads. Cars still move, but delays increase. The same logic applies to data packets.

Global traffic continues to grow at double-digit rates annually. Add seasonal infrastructure strain and concentrated maintenance windows, and performance variability becomes inevitable.

Video Suffers Before Email

Not all applications respond equally to congestion. Email can tolerate delay. File downloads can be slow but still complete. Real-time services such as video conferencing and streaming require consistent packet delivery and low latency.

When rerouting increases latency and jitter, video quality drops first. Calls freeze. Streams reduce resolution. The network remains operational, but user experience declines.

This pattern shows up reliably toward the end of winter.

Winter Changes Demand Patterns

Cold weather drives people indoors. Remote work remains widespread. Schools rely on digital platforms. Gaming activity increases. Major streaming releases and sporting events cluster in Q1.

Demand rises at precisely the moment infrastructure resilience is under pressure. Operators also tend to schedule upgrades in the first quarter, creating additional operational complexity.

At RETN, we consistently observe that the issue is rarely a shortage of global capacity. The challenge lies in uneven resilience and shared bottlenecks. The shortest and most popular routes are often the most vulnerable during peak stress.

Subsea Cables and Quiet Reroutes

Cable cuts make headlines when geopolitics are involved. In reality, many disruptions stem from anchors, fishing activity, or environmental conditions.

In early 2024, multiple disruptions in the Red Sea region forced significant Europe–Asia traffic to reroute. Connectivity largely remained intact, but latency increased along alternative paths.

Longer paths introduce measurable delay. For latency-sensitive services, those milliseconds matter.

The Economic Layer

Digital economies now represent a substantial share of GDP in advanced markets. Connectivity performance is no longer a technical footnote; it is economic infrastructure.

When backbone routes experience strain, enterprises absorb the impact. Service credits are uncommon during large-scale infrastructure events. Businesses continue operating, often at slightly reduced efficiency.

Across thousands of transactions and millions of interactions, marginal delays accumulate.

AI Hype Doesn’t Eliminate Physical Constraints

There is a prevailing narrative that AI will optimise networks into perfect efficiency. Optimisation helps, but it does not alter the underlying physics of fiber or accelerate maritime repairs during storms.

Much of the AI-related growth is concentrated within data centres and access networks rather than long-haul international backbones. International transport still depends on geography, weather, and route diversity.

At RETN, the focus remains on diverse routing, matched-capacity backup paths, and avoiding shared choke points. Redundancy only provides protection when alternative paths have equivalent capacity.

What Can Be Done

For consumers, practical options are limited. Wired connections improve stability for latency-sensitive tasks. Avoiding peak streaming hours can reduce contention. Restarting a router will not resolve congestion thousands of kilometres away.

For enterprises, structural decisions matter more. Multi-provider strategies, true route diversity, and visibility into latency and packet loss across regions provide insulation against seasonal stress.

At RETN, experience shows that resilience is not achieved by simply having a backup path. The backup must be engineered with equal capacity and genuine physical diversity.

The Cold Season Is Predictable

Every industry has a period of concentrated stress. Retail faces December. Finance faces earnings season. Global connectivity faces the end of winter.

Cold weather, deferred maintenance, and concentrated indoor activity converge. Infrastructure performs within design limits, but those limits become visible to end users.

The global internet is more resilient than it was a decade ago. It remains, however, a physical system operating in a physical world.

Author:

Tony O’Sullivan, Chief Executive Officer of RETN, where he drives the company’s long-term network strategy and expansion across Europe and Asia. Since joining in 2007, he has helped transform RETN from a regional carrier into one of the leading independent Eurasian backbone operators, combining financial discipline with deep operational insight. As CEO since 2021, he focuses on building resilient, high-capacity infrastructure designed for the realities of a rapidly shifting digital world.