How did India Manage Data Surge?

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.

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.

Mobile Internet was unable to handle high data rates for many concurrent users. Wi-Fi slowed down due to users FUP/data limits finishing, resulting in bad user experience,as we saw, never seen before, big spikes of data consumption.

But still, the infrastructure held itself up and without facing any major breakdown or letdown, India and India Inc managed through the various phases of lockdown and now Unlock. Here’s why: