Pandemic proves to be good fortune for telecom sector

While every other sector was doomed during the lockdown, the telecommunication sector has been in high demand. The visible shift towards work from home, online gatherings and classes, streaming services such as Netflix for entertainment brought the telecom sector into the spotlight today. The pandemic has shown the importance of the telecom sector in running business and staying connected.

Contrary to many other industries, the telecommunication sector has been generally exempted from major COVID-19-related restrictions, such as stay-at-home orders and quarantine requirements, as it is recognized as an essential service. The importance of having a strong telecommunications network during this lockdown has also been acknowledged by the government in the guidelines, issued by the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA), which provides that telecommunications, internet services, broadcasting and cable services, IT and IT-enabled services only are the essential services and are exempt from the lockdown.

Many telecom players from broadband to mobile to data center operators have benefitted from a surge in the traffic of data and voice. As a result, the telecom sector is performing well compared to other infrastructure sub-sectors. Telecommunications has been directly contributing around 6% of the GDP and during the lockdown, this has gone up 5-6 times, which is huge. According to our India Telecoms Report, India’s internet consumption rose by 13% since the nationwide lockdown. Indians consumed 308 petabytes (PB) of data daily on an average for the week beginning March 22. This sudden overnight surge in demand caught the industry off guard with mobile network operators (MNO) struggling to augment capacity and manage data traffic. The forecasts are that mobile subscriptions and fixed broadband subscribers will continue to fuel the telecoms sector growth in the 2019-25 period.

A recent report by Kantar highlighted that India’s rural areas have witnessed a 45% growth in internet penetration in 2019 as compared to urban India’s 11%. Sector regulator TRAI has asked telecom operators to extend the validity period of prepaid users to ensure that subscribers get uninterrupted services during the 21day nationwide lockdown. Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) has also sought details of the steps being taken to ensure availability of uninterrupted telecom services to such customers on a priority basis.

Telecom sector is continuously adapting to the changes caused due to COVID-19 crisis. Being the sole distributor of Internet infrastructure to other industry verticals, telecom operators have made several amendments in their operations and offerings to serve their customers in a better way.