How did India Manage data Surge?

The Corona spread and the subsequent lockdown led to a massive surge in the use of the internet across India. Lockdowns, social distancing and the new normal of restricted workforce has pushed users to explore new scenarios to maintain life and business continuity

- Raunak Mahehwari

The lockdown, amidst changing a lot of things all around us, made our Internet connection umbilical. It became a major source of entertainment, our connection to the outside world, collaboration tool to get jobs done and our information place for learning and acquiring new skills.

There has been an exponential surge in the Internet consumption as most of the country working from home or staying at home during lockdown.

Currently India is home to 18 million broadband connections that saw as high as 18 GB data per day consumed during lockdown. Video conferencing services saw record downloads, e-commerce players witnessed huge demand for groceries leading them to pivot essentials to focus business, and streaming platforms received unprecedented audiences and time spent.

How the internet Coped

There were understandably some hiccups initially as network infrastructure developers never thought of such an unprecedented situation. The lockdown came unannounced and a lot of service providers were not ready for the abrupt peak. Their upstream capacities were not enough.