On May 5, we interviewed Rajan Mathews, Director General of the Cellular Operators Association of India. We discussed the pandemic, its effects on telecom operators, trends in cellular network traffic, privacy, Net Neutrality, and more. Watch the full interview here. An edited version of the interaction follows. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkhGDLx263A MediaNama: Do you have any numbers for us on growth in internet usage? After the original quarantine announcement, traffic spiked by 30%, and after that it came down to a manageable 12–15% growth on networks. So we were seeing something like 6,900 petabytes of data flowing through the network, which puts us at a high rate of consumption. The usage was shifting very heavily to streaming video type services like YouTube and Zoom, very video-heavy content. That is understandable as people are working from home. The significant issue that was addressed was how to control streaming video. That is one of the things we worked with the DOT on. Changing HD streaming to SD surprisingly did a lot to bring the load down on the networks. Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, and these other companies helped in making the traffic manageable. The DOT also helped us bring 900 base stations back online by coordinating with local municipalities. We now have only 70 offline base stations. That helped us deal with the additional consumption. Another thing that helped was fibre cut incidents reduced substantially from a hundred a day to seven a day. Road laying and construction stopped, so we were able to bring online…
