According to broadband speed testing service Ookla, last week internet speeds slowed slightly in the United States as greater demand is being put on networks from users staying home. Yahoo Finance's tech reporter Dan Howley joins Yahoo Finance Live to tkae a closer look.

Video Transcript

JEN ROGERS: I want to bring in our tech reporter Dan Howley to dive more into what's happening with the internet right now. So we were just talking with Starry's CEO, and he said he actually thinks that we have a lot of headroom in terms of what we can deal with. Is that the sense, in the reporting that you're doing, what this increase in traffic is doing to the internet?

DAN HOWLEY: It's actually interesting because it depends on kind of who you talk to and where you're looking. So I was speaking with AT&T the other day, and they said that they had boosted their network capabilities enough to be able to handle the increase from people doing a lot more video chatting, a lot more schooling from home, and naturally, a lot more video streaming, as people just try to hunker down and stay inside.

It is putting stress on some networks, and some companies are taking the steps to try to reduce that. For instance, Netflix in Europe, YouTube, internationally, they're slowing down bit rate, so basically reducing the quality of video streams to consumers to try to free up some of the internet pipes. And if you think about it, the internet really is just a big pipe that data goes through. So the more people trying to pull from that, the less there is for everybody to get.

So when they're slowing down that bit rate, they're trying to open up more pipe for more people to stay online. So we're seeing additionally from services like Microsoft's Xbox, for instance, when game developers offer downloads for players, they're saying, look, do this at off peak hours for a set amount of time for a set of days, so that people don't pull down more data than they might otherwise use.

We're seeing that from other services like Valve. They're doing that with their Steam platform. So overall, it looks like we do have the headroom going on right now, but there's some reporting saying that some places are seeing slowdown. I personally have Fios. I have a 500 megabit a second connection. So it's just way too fast for what I really need. But I wanted it so I got it.

And I haven't seen any issues on my side of things. Still getting the same speeds that I would normally get, but some users are complaining that they are running into issues as more people get online.

JEN ROGERS: And what kind of role has the government had in this? I know President Trump is holding a call with internet service providers. They've also offered up some more spectrum, I guess, for different cell carriers. So I guess, the level of involvement that we're seeing from the government, is that them realizing that this is a utility, as our last guest said, that we all need, or that we are in an area where we need to be careful not to push this too hard?

DAN HOWLEY: Well, using the word "utility" might send some of the carriers into a flutter, just because if you start calling it that, that it's going to have a lot more regulation behind it. But I think for something like what the government's doing right now, they've kind of said, look, people are going to be working at home. You can't shut them off. So there are some companies that are saying, OK, 60-day grace period. If you go past your bill, we won't shut you down.

Some companies like Cox and Comcast are offering lower tiers, faster speeds. So if you're an entry level user on one of the more affordable plans, you'll start to get 25 megabits per second in speed, or in some cases, 50 megabits per second. And that should allow you to do video chatting to stay online with your work.

So I think that's something that the government was pushing and other carriers are following suit, AT&T, T-Mobile. Verizon's making similar moves, our parent company, as well as Comcast, Cox, Charter, and the whole like.

So I think they're going to probably come out of this meeting with some kind of report, saying, look, this is how much we're seeing effects on our impact on our networks. But I think that overall, in the US, since we had such a buildup for 5G and 4G and we've seen a lot of fiber optic cables late, we're not going to run into as many issues as Europe might have.

JEN ROGERS: All right, Dan Howley checking out the internet for us, making sure it all still works. And it seems to be OK. Thanks so much.