Corona speeds up Internet age
View(s):Many firms have made the shift to an entirely digital life.
Digital meetings substitute physical ones and the group chat has to do for daily catch up. What’s more, virtual birthdays are the ‘now’ thing.
For all the extra time spent online, telcos have announced some crisis- time offerings for data and call credit that’s required. Now companies are reorganising their workforce around virtual workplace models, using video-conferencing and other virtual collaboration tools. Video conferencing tools and apps, such as Skype, Zoom and Houseparty, have gained new waves of fame as workers use them to meet and greet with colleagues while apart, and families and friendship groups stay in touch. As employees and employers get resolute on maintaining productivity and effectiveness in the current crisis, telcos’ data usage has spiked.
All telcos have experienced sharp growth in data usage in the past month. Upstream traffic – data sent by people when using programmes such as video calls – is also up during the day, data shows.
Nalin Perera, CEO Mobitel PLC told the Business Times that their data usage has grown by 10 per cent over the past month. “The work from home concept has seen huge growth in data usage,” he said. He also attributed smartphone penetration which has reached 54 per cent in Sri Lanka as a reason for high growth during this crisis time.
He also added that many new offers introduced by service providers have driven data usage over the past month.
An official from Hutch noted that with the daily Rs.15 emergency reload which was introduced by them for free has seen close to 1 million customers utilising it over the past month. The demand for video conferencing, streaming services like Netflix, news, and online shopping coming from residential broadband networks is surging. Telcos say that they expect this trend of data growth to continue.
Telecom providers also said that the voice usage has dropped due to data growth but the former is the main revenue generator. (DEC)