Significance Of High-speed Home Internet During The Time Of Social Distancing

Yet again, it has been proven that broadband connectivity is a utility and this time it is COVID-19 that has shown us it’s necessity. When the situation of a pandemic forced us to be socially distanced, ensuring the closure of schools, offices and so on, a majority of people are managing their work from home and even practicing a comparatively new concept of taking remote medical diagnosis on a basic level from doctors. Now, the same old question comes into picture that if the existing broadband infrastructure is enough or not to handle all these necessities of the hour?

Yes, the reliable high-speed broadband at every home is an absolute necessity especially in a situation like this.

While some of the developed countries recognized internet access as a basic right, Finland (Ranked 1^st in UN’s happiness index) went ahead further and passed an order a decade ago that every internet connection should have a broadband level speed. A couple of years back India declared a new policy ‘National Digital Communications Policy 2018’ that suggests it would be critical to focus on fiber deployment in order to expand broadband connectivity across the country, and as a result, India adopted a strategy of Implementing a ‘Fiber First Initiative’ to take fiber to the home, enterprises and key development institutions in towns (Tier I, Tier II and Tier III) and also to rural clusters by keeping the goal to provide universal broadband connectivity at 50 Mbps to every citizen by 2022.

Be it any access technology that’s used, whether it is cellular, Wi-Fi or wired connection to your personal device, the last mile connectivity is critical to ensure adequate speed and reliability.

According to a data released by TRAI last year, only 1.6 million wired internet subscribers get to use fiber enabled services, which only makes 8% of the total subscriber base.

In the situation of COVID-19, though the mobile operators are putting their effort to make sure the coverage and connectivity, a significant increase in network traffic makes it difficult to achieve the speed through mobile internet. This situation has put the people who don’t have the fiber enabled home broadband in difficulty to stay connected and handle their work from home. COVID-19 has taught us one more lesson here that the mobile internet is not the answer for everything.

This COVID-19 situation will push each one of us to ask a question to ourselves that if our broadband infrastructure is capable enough to handle these types of current and future requirements or not?

The good news is that the building owners have already started giving attention to make sure that each of their sellable units are Fiber-Enabled. More often, they prefer a multi-operator, multi-technology and future-proof  cable dock to multiple individual cable runs. The cable dock will provide user, the flexibility to choose the service provider. This will be a USP for builders, especially during the post-COVID situation.

Fiber cable dock inside the home will act as the backbone for high-speed broadband that will enable you to convert your home to a smart home where you can work from home seamlessly, consult with a doctor via telemedicine and so on.

So, the high-speed broadband access should be considered a basic utility and right to everyone just like clean water and electricity, and FTTU (Fiber to the Unit) is the critical requirement to drive this.

Blog by :

Ragesh Puthusseri

Director- Technology and Innovation

Cablesmith