Containing COVID-19: Data consumption in Ghana has gone up since more people are working from home according to MTN Ghana CEO, Selorm Adadevoh

After Ghana recorded some cases, the government announced measures to reduce the spread of coronavirus in the country.

These measures include the closing down of all schools and a ban on public gatherings including religious activities.

To also help in reducing the spread of the virus, several organizations have asked their staff to work from home to observe the social distancing practice to prevent the spread of the virus.

In an interview with Accra-based Citi FM, Mr Adadevoh said that the growing number of people working from home is responsible for the rise in data usage.

“Every day there is a change, it depends on really what’s happening, but somewhere between 15 and 20 percent will be a fair estimate of the increase we are seeing so far across the board,” he said as a response to how data usage has increased in the past few days.

He added that the increase in data usage was expected since a lot of people were also looking for information online from home.

“It’s fair to assume that if you have the situation we have currently with students at home, a lot of people are connecting online now. Apart from students we also have workers who are trying to work from home now. So there is a lot of emphasis on working remotely. Now what this means is you have to rely more on data services to be able to connect to remote services for different employers or educational institutions”.

He, however, indicated that the biggest challenge now is for telcos to continue offering a high-quality service to consumers in these times.

“As an operator, the biggest challenge will be how to continue to provide the right levels of capacity and service so that the experience is not deteriorated. You’ll see Facebook traffic increase significantly, and Netflix as well. These are some of the very high volumes that we see. You’ll see Youtube as well increase and of course educational sites,” he said.

Meanwhile, Mr Adadevoh, says reducing the cost of data to boost communication could increase traffic that will affect internet speed.