The COVID-19 pandemic has forced people to stay home for longer and that has led to a strain on services.
This is shown quite well with a report by Business Daily. According to the publication, Safaricom reported a 40% traffic surge in data.
The interesting bit is that they singled out the use of Netflix on Safaricom networks. According to the company, traffic on the video streaming site rose fourfold to 60Gbps, which is quite insane.
It is not a surprise that Netflix traffic has gone up during this time. The service is popular, especially in the urban areas where it offers a number of TV shows and movies that you can stream on your PC, TV, gaming console or your phone. If you are a regular user of Netflix, you will notice that new releases on Netflix quickly jump to the top 10 most-watched content on the site.
This also comes at a time when services like Netflix are grappling with the increased load on their servers. Netflix was able to reduce their traffic load by 25% while still being able to maintain their video quality stream. Other video-on-demand services like Showmax capped their resolutions on their mobile apps in a bid to reduce traffic.
Safaricom’s CEO, Peter Ndegwa, said that their combined mobile and fixed home internet reached 2.34 petabytes per day. That translates to an average of 97Gbps per hour on their network.
“This trend has been recorded not just on mobile data, but also on home fiber whose peak throughput of mobile data is now more than 150Gbps whereas home fiber has been hitting 200Gpbs at its busiest times,” Safaricom’s CEO, Peter Ndegwa was quoted as saying.
The new Safaricom CEO said that they have taken measures to make sure that the company has put in additional measures to ‘facilitate these additional digital connections between customers and the rest of the world.’ They also recently doubled the bandwidth capabilities of their fiber customers during this time when they will be using such services the most.
