The internet peak traffic in India saw a 40 per cent rise in March and there was a significant spike in downloads and uploads per user owing to high volume of work and streaming content across all major cities, including Tier-II markets, says a new report.

While the average downloads increased by 66 per cent per user per month, the average uploads surged at 37 per cent per user per month, according to 'State of Internet Traffic Trend' report by ACT Fibernet, one of India's largest wired Internet Service Provider.

The data are based on overall traffic data measured from February to April 2020 in 19 cities.

The Narendra Modi government at the Centre enforced a nationwide lockdown on March 24 to curb the speard of coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. Since then, the lockdown has been extended twice with some relaxations. Currently, India is under Lockdown 3.0, which is to end on May 17. 

One of the most interesting revelations was that on a particular day in March, 98.7 per cent of entire ACT Fibernet subscriber base was concurrently online.

"In the past two months, we have seen a significant shift in data consumption across cities as people moved to working from home, spending more time streaming content, indulging in online gaming, taking online classes/course, video conferencing etc," said Bala Malladi, CEO, Atria Convergence Technologies Ltd.

While there has been an overall surge of 55 per cent in streaming traffic, there was no significant difference between weekday and weekend streaming and/or traffic now.

There was an overall traffic increase by 73 per cent on weekdays and 65 per cent increase on weekends, said the report.

India now has 504 million active Internet users, out of which about 14 per cent are in the age bracket of 5-11 years, according to a new report from the Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI).

Based on data from the Indian Readership Survey (IRS) 2019, the research also found that nearly 70 per cent of the active Internet population in India is daily users.

The time spent on the Internet continues to be higher in urban India compared to rural India.