MTS India, the telecom brand of Sistema Shyam Teleservices is planning to pan India, not with CDMA mobile network, rather they will be banking on WiFi to grab a pie of the upcoming data boom in the country.
For MTS, data services remain a very important part of their growth strategy. At present their non-voice revenues account for nearly 47% of total earnings. Being a CDMA operator, MTS pushed its Wifi dongles (Mblaze Ultra WiFi, later rebranded as Homespot Wifi to tap home users too. A new TVC on Internet Baby - No Wifi, No Go is also out.) to reach existing GSM or 3G customers, and frankly they are quite successful (take a pinch of salt, out of them how many are really active users?).
As a first step, MTS is successful to get DoT's nod to obtain a class A ISP license, which will help them to offer Wifi across the country. The investment plans are yet to reveal, but it's obvious they will target to be present in rail stations, airports, malls, fast food chains, office zones in different cities.
It should be noted that MTS is already such business as they started ops in Rapid Metro of Gurgaon, and similar plans in Delhi, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and some other cities.It's definitely a good approach from MTS, as most operators like Reliance Jio, Uninor, Ozone Wifi, Vodafone, Aircel, Tata Docomo, Idea, BSNL, Airtel are running for the same.In a different note, Shyam Telecom's broadband arm, Spectranet is powering Aircel's pay-only Wifi services in different cities.
Also read: MTS reduces data offering on 999 pack by 40% and increases price of 40GB pack by 33%
There is another concern that how MTS is gonna backhaul these public WiFi hotpots. Fiber is the proper answer, and MTS can go 'lay some, share some and rent some' way for faster roll-out process.
