In today's story @TheKenWeb , i report on how a countrywide lockdown has turned network planning upside down for Indian telecom operators and how they scramble to keep the network up and running. A thread on what it means for subscribers, operators. http://bit.ly/2Uyonbz 

Just 2 days after Janta Curfew, telecom networks saw a rise of 5 to 8% traffic. In the next seven days the load on the network grew over 40% in residential pockets across major circles in India n/1

According to DE-CIX internet exchange, most of this load comes from bandwidth hungry applications including video conferencing solutions, cloud and gaming, social media and OTT’s n/2

In commercial areas, networks are under-utilised. Sites (read tower) in residential areas are lesser in number & capacity. “Commercial offices & areas have greatr density of cell towers & are more apt to be connected by dedicated circuits, fibre,” says an industry executive n/3

And all of this traffic is now coming from indoors, where the signal strength is also weaker. “The signals get weaker when you move from one wall(room) to another,” says another industry executive n/4

“Earlier, 70% of traffic was indoor and 30% outdoor. Now it is 100% indoors. That adds pressure on the network,” the second executive says n/5

Entire traffic pattern has changed. No one can plan network for this change in traffic. “If i were to make changes in the network — one third of my network will go waste when things normalise,” said the second executive n/6

So how does this matter? Well, the networks are slowing down, according to http://speedtest.net  run by Ookla. The network latency is increasing n/7

Here is the March 30 report https://www.speedtest.net/insights/blog/tracking-covid-19-impact-global-internet-performance/ n/8

Rightly so. Network capacity utilisation in residential areas in all major cities has gone beyond 90-100%, according to multiple executives supporting the networks of India’s three private operators n/9

Telecom circles such as Karnataka are seeing over 90-100% capacity utilisation. In Karnataka, even the fibre backhaul utilisation of one of leading operators has reached 96% n/10

From monitoring network load once a day, operators and its tech team managing Network Operations Centre are monitoring load on an hourly basis n/11

ISPs have seen a significant jump in new connection requests. They are, however, unable to serve in the current lockdown—right now all hands on maintaining and supporting the existing connections n/12

Operators are scrambling to augment network capacity, lower traffic load. On telcos request, video OTTs have decided to lower resolution from HD to SD.This, however, can only be a short-term measure to relieve networks, says Frankfurt based internet exchange n/13

In days to come either traffic load stabilises. Or this will only get worse n/14