Indian Telecom Companies Stretching Resources Beyond Capacity To Meet Growing Mobile Video Traffic: Skyfire Study

Indians are increasingly consuming multimedia content, especially video on their mobile screens. However, at the back–end, telecom companies are struggling extensively to meet the increasing demand. Such scale–up of critical services has resulted in user frustration and drop in consumer satisfaction.

According to a recently concluded study by Skyfire, a cloud-based mobile video-optimization company, more than half (56%) of the mobile subscribers on India’s telecom networks are suffering from elementary video issues like routine and significant stagnation and re-buffering. Technically referred to as ‘Significant Stalling’, it is defined as a video that stalls or buffers more than 10% of its overall playback time. Eventually it results in users abandoning the hope of watching the video and end up switching off the video being played.

Skyfire collated its global data on mobile video network loads with long–term bandwidth test data from wireless network authority OpenSignal, using recent data from 2013 on India’s networks.

Are India’s networks so bad?
Shockingly, the aforementioned rudimentary issues are faced on supposedly faster 3G Network. In all, 83% of users on 3G, experience at least some stalling while trying to watch video. This means more than 8 out of 10 people are currently facing issues playing videos on their mobile devices despite paying higher tariff to access the allegedly faster 3G network.

This is a great cause of concern not only to content generators and publishers, but to the telecom companies as well. While YouTube rewards more to people whose videos are watched till the end, contributors even have the ability to insert more ads (and earn more) at the beginning, middle and end of a lengthy video. However, none should be more concerned than the telecom companies. Data Streams are by far the fastest growing segment. Subscribers are enthusiastically watching and consuming content on the mobile screens. Additionally, though the content is myriad in nature, it still requires a robust and reliable high–speed connection. Furthermore, these very telecom companies are facing heavy reductions in their traditional revenue streams, i.e. Voice and SMS.

According to Cisco’s 2013 Visual Networking Index, mobile data traffic in India is projected to reach a mind–boggling 900 Petabytes Per Month by 2017, with 60% of that data coming from mobile video alone. Considering the magnitude, it appears MTNL is the only company to have realized the need to augment its data network. What do you think?

Image Source | Indian Express

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