Consumers of mobile and home broadband services, especially those in urban areas, have seen their network speeds slow down by around 20% because of a surge in consumption of up to 30% on an average, especially of videos.
This is expected to get worse, with speeds likely to slow by another 25-30%, as internet usage is seen to be increasing more, clogging networks even as the country stays locked down due to the Covid-19 outbreak, industry experts said.
“Data usage will increase 30% at least over the next few weeks and the uptick will continue till the lockdown exists,” said Rajesh Chharia, president of Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI). The industry body said cities such as Bengaluru and Hyderabad have already seen cellular network data consumption increase by 70% since the lockdown began.
Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI), that represents all private telcos, estimates that data consumption on an average has increased 30% in the lockdown period so far.
It has appealed to subscribers for responsible usage of network, especially during peak hours of 9 am-11am and 4 pm-9 pm, to prevent congestion. India has about 687.62 million internet users, of which only 22.26 million are wired broadband users while the remaining are mobile or ‘wireless’ internet users.
The country went under a three-week lockdown from March 25 to limit the spread of Covid-19. This meant work from home, remote education and entertainment, all of which are now either being transitioned to home broadband networks or onto mobile connections that are concentrated in the same place.
“The networks are not ready to take this increase,” Chharia said. “At this moment, the government should allow sharing of active infrastructure between ISPs so that cellular operators can offload their data traffic to ISPs.”
Analysts said the average download speed has gone down significantly from 11.83 mbps recorded by Ookla’s Speedtest Global Index in February as residential areas have turned into work stations for India Inc.
“The number of simultaneous users has gone up by 3x in the residential zones in the last two weeks in metros,” said Rajiv Sharma, head of research at SBICap Securities.
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