Apps for work, entertainment push data demand in India by 20% in 3 weeks: DE-CIX

With the country under coronavirus lockdown, applications supporting work-from-home, edtech, video streaming and gaming led to a spike in data consumption by 20 per cent in the last three weeks, according to the internet exchange firm DE-CIX.

The company has seen use of collaborative tools like Zoom, Skype, Webex, Microsoft teams, etc doubled and 120 per cent jump in traffic of video streaming apps like Netflix, Zee5, Amazon Prime, etc, including gaming apps.

"We have seen an averag,e 20 per cent jump in data traffic in India in the last three weeks. Collaborative tools, video streaming app and gaming apps now account for around 80 per cent of the total internet traffic in India," DE-CIX International CEO Ivo Ivanov told PTI.

He said that the surge in data consumption without complaint of work getting affected shows that digital infrastructure is going to be key for managing economies.

"This type of behaviour of people using collaborative tools with some people being first time users shows that it could stay even after the coronavirus problem is solved," Ivanov said.

DE-CIX facilitates brandwidth trade for applications like Hotstar, Netflix, cloud computing companies, data centres, telecom operators, etc through network interconnection services.

"The data surge of 20 per cent has been noticed in the last 2-3 weeks compared to the data consumption pattern in January-February," Ivanov said.

The company has recorded peak data consumption at 2.45 terabit per second on March 18 which means 2.64 crore gigabyte of data usage in a day. During normal days data consumption in India is around 81 GB per second which is around 70 lakh GB in a day.

Ivanov said that there is no congestion on the network of the company, however, telecom operators and internet service providers will need to expand their capacity for delivering service to the end customers.

"All stakeholders should treat digital infrastructure on high priority," he said.

The company is now looking to expand presence of its internet exchanges in India to more 12 cities in the next 2-3 years.