If you’re one of the people that has unfortunately been plagued by rain’s spotty internet connections in the past two weeks, you’re certainly not alone. Myself, along with plenty of others, have experienced intermittent outages in our internet connections, so I reached out to rain to figure out what’s going on.
The answer, as I’m sure you can expect, is due to massive surges in user activity during the lockdown. With everyone stuck inside their homes, constantly guzzling up hour upon hour of Netflix, most service providers have been struggling to keep up with the demand given the country’s limited infrastructure. Yet a new service like rain is arguably struggling even more, as it resorts exclusively to mobile data and signal towers. It also sounds like nothing can really be done about it, so you’ll have to get used to your ping skying to 4000 every 30 minutes of browsing the web.
I reached out to rain’s Chief Marketing Officer Khaya Dlanga to ask for more information on the situation. “Since the lockdown, rain has seen more than a 50% increase in traffic. The increase in traffic is a phenomenon that has been experienced by networks throughout the globe since the beginning of the COVID19 pandemic. The average throughput per user is only marginally down and all other performance parameters are within acceptable boundaries,” said Dlanga.
Which doesn’t exactly explain why so many people have been struggling recently, but that might have something to do with changes in our personal geographies. “Some users have been affected more than others. We have seen geographic traffic patterns change with so many people working from home in the suburbs. The mobile 4G network was not designed to carry such heavy traffic in those areas, and as such there are some congested towers,” continued Dlanga.
So the standard reasoning, basically. No word was given on whether or not these shortcomings will be looked into and possibly fixed in future but I think the fact that the “average throughput per user is only marginally down and all other performance parameters are within acceptable boundaries” tells you everything you need to know. So maybe think about bracing yourselves, fellow rain users. Doesn’t look like help is coming after all.