It’s true that the pandemic has decelerated the growth of many sectors of the Indian economy, but the telecom sector is not one of them, according to a report by DE-CIX India, data traffic from the period of February 2020 to December 2020 saw an increase of 192%. The study which was done by the world’s leading operator of Internet Exchanges DE-CIX, along with BENOCS GmbH, the Brandenburg Technical University Cottbus-Senftenberg, the IMDEA Networks Institute in Madrid, the Max Planck Institute for Computer Science, and the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, was aimed at understanding how the pandemic has affected the global internet structure.
What came as a relief to the researchers is that although there was a huge upsurge in the data traffic the internet was able to cope well. It was also noted that the use of virtual private networks (VPN) and video conferencing saw a very sharp increase in usage. In India, there was a 328% increase in data from video conferencing, a 1316% increase in streaming, and a 1006% increase in gaming. Usage of the internet also shifted. Before the pandemic, there was high data traffic seen in the evening time whereas now the usage was evenly distributed thoroughly out the day.
Nowhere was the effect of the pandemic on the internet more evident than in India where OTT and VOD services saw a 1317% growth, gaming data saw a growth of 1007%, and social media traffic increased by 210%. Dr. Christoph Dietzel, Global Head of Products & Research for DE-CIX said that with all the changes that were going on this year with the internet, there was a growing concern among users if the internet could sustain such growth. But it was that the exact opposite had happened. Because of the flexibility and adaptability of the internet, the increased volume of traffic cold is easily absorbed. The internet, defined as the network of networks consists of over 60000 subnetworks that are robust enough to handle anything thrown at them. There is no denying that the pandemic has transformed the face of global communication as a whole.
