According to BofA (Bank of America), Bharti Airtel and Reliance Jio are set to benefit from a 10 per cent jump in data traffic as more offices are switching to ‘work from home’ (WFH) citing COVID-19 outbreak.
The firm expects Airtel to be a bigger beneficiaryfrom the trend as a pure-play telco. Further, BofA report indicates that Jio witnessed a surge in new connections.
With this, BofA added, that the mobile and fixed broadband business of Airtel and Jio are expected to benefit in near-term.
The report added that India has over 630 million mobile (3G/4G) users versus 19 million fixed broadband users. As fixed broadband penetration is 6 per cent, majority of the WFH traffic, or about 70 per cent plus, is expected to be on cellular network.
However, as per BofA if WFH continues for a longer duration, this might in turn increase companies’ capital expenditure (capex).
As per the report, certain vendors have stated that the networks are not equipped to handle sudden surge in traffic and hence may lead to sharp slowdowns in data speeds and may need heavy buffering in the near future.
