After providing 600 Wi-Fi access points all over the country, now the Department of Telecommunications has decided to level up the game by planning to install 10,000 more Wi-Fi hotspots in the country in the coming next month. Aruna Sundararajan, Telecom Secretary, told in an official statement “The idea is to launch it first, and refine as we go. We expect to launch 10,000 Wi-Fi hotspots when we launch it next month, and scale up to a 100,000 in the first three months.”
Until now, users in India have relied more on mobile data to surf the internet. The DoT wants to change the scenario by implementing the ‘Public Open Wi-Fi’ project which will fuel the use of cheap internet connectivity in tier 2 and tier 3 cities of the country.
As we already know, the pilot project for this new initiative was launched in October 2017. The pilot project checked the interoperability between Wi-Fi networks and the systems, the result of which showed that in a project involving 603 access points, 96.3% of users found the system friendly. The report was also interesting as it highlighted that Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays were the days where the network was highly used.
Sundarajan also stated “On the infra provisioning (people who set up paid public Wi-Fi access points) alone, this project will definitely create 500,000 entrepreneurs,” she further added “In addition, people who can get into content creation and sachetisations (sell Re 1 and Rs 3 internet packs), etc., is also significant.” This news was reported by ET.
The concept on which this new project is being based upon is of the PDOs (Public Data Office providers) which similar to PCOs, will provide data services to the users instead of calling services. This new initiative is likely to propel small businesses to become PDOs via a simple registration process.
