This will free up critical bandwidth that will enable more work from home and remote teleconferencing. We can’t increase available bandwidth overnight. It is better to suffer slightly decreased internet speed compared to lots of dropped packets if Internet pipes are clogged.
It's not like ISPs could have build and extended their bandwidth over the last years, for example with the 40 €/month my father pays for < 16 MBit internet connection.
The problem is, now is the only time when something actually can be done.
When this overs, we're going back to "everything's fine" until some crisis happens again...
Where is that? I think internet quality varies quite a lot within the EU, urban vs rural, etc so we can'treally generalise. I pay less than 40eur for a 600mbit connection.
In Germany, 40 €/month can get you anything between <16 MBit (more like 4 MBit where I come from/my family lives) and 200 MBit.
While the infrastructure is quite stable where it has been extended, those rural areas ("not prioritized for broadband builds") are also affected by the lockdown, people have to work from home, use the internet all day etc. pp. In those places, the infrastructure reaches its limits pretty quickly all the time. This will cause _serious_ damage to local businesses for no good reason other than ISPs unwillingness to invest there.
My parents pay a similar amount for 70% of a 16/1 MBit connection. But that is not quite rural, it's one of the richest towns in the country and part of a big agglomeration.
I get 100 MBit for 40 €/month. As mentioned in another comment, it's not about Netflix but doing home office during lockdown, remote work in general and more. People in those "underdeveloped" areas are really fucked, altough they pay the same money that I do. They just don't simply get anything (better) for that.
