Most of us are using the internet and our phones a lot more these days. According to Cloudflare -- who recently published these stats on how the pandemic has impacted internet usage -- traffic is up about 36% in Toronto between early January and late March 2020. Here is a heatmap of the city:
Similar maps are available for other major cities across the world. The red areas are places where internet traffic has declined and the green areas are where internet traffic has increased. Looking at Toronto, you can see that usage in the financial core of the city has, not surprisingly, declined. This makes sense. Most people are now at home using the internet there.
It would be interesting to see some sort of split between residential and commercial usage, because my mind is associating these red areas with businesses. And when you do that, some cities, like Toronto and New York, appear very monocentric; whereas others, like Berlin, appear far more polycentric.
The other thing Cloudfare looked at was internet activity by category (as of March 2020). What is also not surprising is that kids content is way up, and leads by a wide margin. For you real estate folks, you should also note that apartment searches seem to be down and are not far off from air travel. Now would be a suboptimal time to move.
Much of this probably won't surprise you, but it is revealing nonetheless.
