Airtel, BSNL and Vodafone Wi-Fi Hotspots Compared Across Footprint, Data and Pricing

There has already been an announcement in the telecom industry about the deployment of more than a million Wi-Fi hotspots across the country by the year-end. Almost all big telcos like Bharti Airtel, Vodafone Idea and BSNL, are deploying massive Wi-Fi hotspot sites to extend internet availability for their subscribers. These telecom operators are offering free data to their subscribers in these hotspots, providing a broad footprint of hotspots across the country and also retailing Wi-Fi hotspot plans for their subscribers in case they need to use more than the allotted data. In public places, these hotspots will be especially useful as they will grant high-speed internet access to subscribers very quickly. Here is a quick run-up between the various Wi-Fi hotspots which the telcos have introduced in India.

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Coverage

When it comes to Wi-Fi hotspot, there is no telecom operator which comes even near to the government led telecom operator, BSNL. Although the operator is lagging in the 4G network, the government led telco has deployed Wi-Fi hotspots at over 30,000 locations in 16,367 sites. There is also a large directory on BSNL website, where users will be able to find out their nearest Wi-Fi hotspot location which BSNL is providing.

This is in comparison to the other telcos like Vodafone which have currently deployed around 200 Wi-Fi hotspots majorly centred in big cities like Mumbai, Pune and Bangalore. On the other hand, Airtel’s Wi-Fi Zone service which is a similar offering like BSNL’s and Vodafone’s is currently available in around 500 locations across various parts of Delhi, Karnataka, Pune, Hyderabad locations.

Pricing and Data

Firstly, talking about Vodafone, the telecom operator has not yet put out a specific tariff card for the users of its Wi-Fi hotspots although it has announced that all of its postpaid and prepaid customers who have a data pack or combined offering which exceeds 1GB will get additional 1GB data to be used on these Wi-Fi hotspots. In case they exceed this 1GB limit, they will be able to use their existing 3G or 4G Wi-Fi quota on these hotspots as well. Further, Vodafone customers will be able to check their data quota by dialling *111# on their phones. Since the extra data credit for Wi-Fi hotspots will not be valid for 2G customers, they will be able to select a data sachet from the list of ‘VFWiFiVoucher’ in case they want to access data from Vodafone Wi-Fi hotspots.