In addition to increased data volumes, there have been fundamental changes to data traffic during the pandemic. With millions of people working from home, there has been a shift away from the city centre to the suburbs. Separately, the typical number of simultaneous devices using a single connection has increased. Upgrades to higher-priced plans offering faster speeds have increased the household spend on broadband for many.
Suburban data traffic has gone from mostly passive (downloading and browsing, some streaming) to mostly active (using bandwidth-intensive services such as videoconferencing and high-demand services such as Virtual Private Networks).
All telecommunications networks acted to address the situation in 2020, so there were only isolated examples of focal congestion and relatively few complaints to the Telecommunications Industry Ombudsman.25
According to data published by the Ombudsman, the biggest issue for both large and small telecommunications businesses was customer service.26 National lockdowns, particularly in offshore customer service operations, greatly reduced the number of customer service staff.
Many network operators have learned from this experience. They have revised their risk management strategies and decided to move from offshore to onshore customer service models.