Akamai sees internet traffic growth easing to pre-covid levels in 2021

Pune: After a lockdown-fueled spike in 2020, global internet traffic growth is likely to ease to pre-pandemic levels in 2021, Akamai Technologies Inc. has said.

And while a lot of changes—preference for e-commerce and remote working—could become permanent, overall internet traffic growth would stabilise, Tom Leighton, chief executive at the global content delivery network told ET. “Our business was geared to supporting this, and we have accelerated our efforts,” he said.

But even as things start to normalise next year, Leighton expects newer areas to drive growth in internet traffic. Remote learning will get more popular, as will online collaboration, he said. “Things we are seeing now will become much more permanent. For instance, It will be a long time before you have 1,000 people packed into a room for a marketing event,” said Leighton.


In 2020, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company added 100 terabytes of capacity per second, and will continue to invest in supplementing this capacity and increasing performance. Cyber security is another important focus area for the company as it sees an increase in cyber threats globally.

“India is one of our fastest growing countries. We are continuing to grow our capabilities and presence, and will be adding more people too,” Leighton said.

The Asia Pacific-Japan region was Akamai’s fastest growing market even before the pandemic and continues to remain so. India is an important market, with an increasing customer base and its largest global office. The country houses about 2,000 employees, or a quarter of the company’s total workforce across functions.

“All our development teams have contingents here — from making servers more efficient, improving performance, security and network operations centres,” said Leighton. “India is a fundamental location for us. It plays a lot of roles — it has a growing customer base, global sales and support, core operations and network deployment are managed here and products are developed here.”