During this lockdown since March 25, people are working from home, this made broadband network usage 25% rise.
According to the Crisil reports, the usage has been hiked but the speed of data has been slowed down.
The coronavirus lockdown has come as a godsend for broadband companies, which has been immobility with subscribers at 18-19 million since 2016, due to the intense war of price in the mobile telephone space.
At 6%, fixed broadband penetration in India which is the lowest in all the world. In Chine 55%, 70% in Eurozone, 80% in Japan.
The report said “In the medium term, we expect mobile tariffs to be hiked. That will help sustain some of the upticks in fixed broadband usage because its price differential with mobile data reduces.”
Till now, the lower speed 4G served the purpose for people due to affordable smartphones, it said.
Reports also said, “But now, the subscription to fixed broadband, especially in the urban areas, have surged because millions are working from home.”
Doug Suttles, a CEO of Ookla “What we’re seeing (in India) is a bit different than in the US. There, people are not using mobile phones as much, so we didn’t really see much of a change in mobile usage except a bit less of it. Fixed broadband is being used for far more things. In India, what we’ve seen so far is that mobile has slowed down. There have been only a little bit of effects so far on broadband. This may change this week, with a true national lockdown.”
According to the department of telecom, which collated reports from service providers the daily average consumption is this lockdown period is 9% higher than 282PB data used on March 21 ( the day Janata curfew was announced) and 13% more than March 19 when consumption was 270PB.
India’s consumption has been increased over the last few years. Nokia’s annual Mobile Broadband India Traffic Index (Mbit) reports says that there was a 47% jump in overall data traffic in India in the year 2019.
Rajesh Chharia from the Internet Service Providers Association of India (ISPAI) said that “If the infrastructure of the provider is full, they may be allowed to overload it with the infrastructure of another to spread the network. This will ensure uninterrupted service.”
