Preface

A few days into the fifth (or sixth? I’ve lost track) COVID-19 lockdown in my city of Mumbai, there was a sudden power loss and my Wi-fi got disconnected. I was in the middle of watching an episode of Kingdom on Netflix and I was really desperate to complete the last few minutes.

So I switched on my mobile data and hoped for the same seamless HD quality that I was watching a minute ago. What I got instead was grainy, highly pixelated crap that took 15 minutes to buffer.

The. episode. had. only. 5. minutes. left.

So that got me thinking about mobile data speed in general and my download speed in particular. I really couldn’t remember the last time I had such a bad case of low speed data.

Motivation

I was curious to know if the lockdown and sudden surge in mobile data usage across the country had negatively affected average data speeds. My assumption was that my service provider, Airtel, was struggling with high speed data, much more than the others (call it user bias?!) and to test this, I carried out this small project.

#data-science #covid19 #mobile #data-visualization