The other is sudden network congestion as governments, emergency responders, and citizens all start using their handsets.38 To reduce the probability of service outages, countries should frequently stress test their networks and where necessary take steps to ‘harden’ the weaker components. Based on information from around 90 countries, the mean rate of packet loss globally is 1.68 per cent and the mean latency globally is 107.31 milliseconds. In the Asia-Pacific region performance on these indicators varies greatly.