India’s largest free public Wi-Fi program seems to be panning out pretty well in Mumbai city

Early last month Chief Minister of Maharashtra, Devendra Fadnavis announced an ambitious program to deploy India’s largest free public wifi network in the metropolitan city of Mumbai which is also the state capital. On the 6th January, around 500 public hotspots went live, and the chief minister promised that the number would steadily increase to reach 1200 by 1st May 2017. These hotspots do not have any time based or data volume based usage limitations.

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Aaple-Sarkar-WiFI-Mumbai

I decided to get some first-hand experience of the free wifi service on the streets of South Mumbai, which happens to be where I reside in the city. The above image shows a poster of ‘Aaple Sarkar’ which is the name of the public wifi network, such signs have been put up at regular intervals along the streets on the CCTV camera poles which serve the dual function of surveillance as well as doubling as wifi hotspots.

Connecting to the network is a fairly straightforward process where one just has to check for available wifi networks and select the one with SSID Aaple_Sarkar_Mum-Wifi and then he will be presented with a login page where he has to enter his mobile number and submit, following which he will receive an OTP via SMS which he enters in the following screen along with his name and clicks on submit. The network then connects by assigning an IP address to your phone, and every subsequent time that you connect, you just need to enter your number and connect without having to go through OTP verification step so long as the same number is entered on the same handset.