2nd Covid wave didn’t hit average download speed for Indians

New Delhi: As India battled the lethal second Covid wave and data consumption increased with millions staying home during lockdowns, the mobile users had a smooth download speed experience across the country unlike when the first lockdown phase hit the country last year, a new report has showed.

In the last three weeks of April, average data consumption had soared between 19.9 per cent and 22.7 per cent.

“However, this time we saw little change in the average download speed experience, showing that mobile operators successfully prepared their networks to cope with the increased data demand by their users due to the latest wave of the Covid-19 pandemic,” said the report by mobile analytics company Opensignal.

This highlights that the Indian mobile experience has been remarkably resilient during the second wave despite increased demand for mobile data.

During the first lockdown in March 2020, Indian smartphone users’ average mobile data consumption increase drastically, along with significant drops in the users’ average Download Speed Experience.

“We observed a sharp increase in the average mobile data consumed by our smartphone users on a weekly basis — 26.8 per cent to 30.1 per cent higher than at the beginning of 2020,” the report said.

The increased mobile data consumption lasted for six weeks between the last weeks of March 2020 and May 2020, before it gradually decreased towards pre-lockdown levels.

Concurrently, the users saw significant declines in their average download speeds — up to 24.8 per cent, compared to the first week of 2020.

The average mobile data consumption and the overall download speeds experienced by the users had returned back to pre-lockdown levels between June 29 and July 13, 2020, “and remained more or less the same until the second week of February 2021, after which the average data consumption started to grow substantially,” the report showed.