Jumping up from your moment of inertia, you suddenly realise that you need to log on to the Net to read an urgent email. You flip open your laptop and wait for the Wi-Fi icon—that tiny dot with radio waves radiating outwards—to glow and greet you with a long list of available wireless networks.
Now, if you’re at Khan Market or Connaught Place in the national capital, chances are that you might not be able to connect to the network at all, or that the speed would be so painfully slow that you would be forced to switch back to mobile data. In case you do manage to connect, always remember the cap of a certain period of time beyond which you will need to cough up money to continue.
If you are at a railway station (that jewel in the crown of the central government, where it has been able to provide free Wi-Fi services to over 50 lakh passengers a month at 115 railway stations across the country, as per a claim made by railway minister Suresh Prabhu recently), you might regret whose phone you accidentally glance at. A survey conducted last year by RailTel, a ‘Miniratna’ enterprise of the Union government, revealed that Patna Junction had topped the list of railway stations in India with maximum Internet searches for porn sites!
And if you happen to be on a long-distance flight with nothing but the blue skies and silvery clouds outside your window for company, well then, the dream (or nightmare, depending on your proclivity for constant connectivity) of Wi-Fi at 30,000 feet will remain just that. That’s the case at least in Indian airspace, as the world’s fastest-growing major air-travel market continues to hold out on onboard Wi-Fi (even as neighbours Pakistan and China allow it) apparently over security concerns.
As per protocol, even international flights at present flying over the Indian airspace discontinue their onboard Wi-Fi service while in the region. For a long time now, apart from flights from Indian origin, overflying aircraft (international aircraft using Indian airspace) have been requesting permission to allow the use of onboard Wi-Fi in India. It’s a different story that onboard Wi-Fi is common in the US, as well as on many international carriers. It has even been certified ‘safe’ by the US Federal Aviation Administration besides several other regulatory bodies.
In India, the term ‘free Wi-Fi’ has remained a misnomer. Everyone wants to remain digitally connected and grab a piece of the action, but no one knows how to go about it. The Union and state governments, for one, seem to be on a Wi-Fi distribution spree. From railway stations and public parks to schools and colleges, they have been making one announcement after another. But a look at the ground reality paints a difficult picture.
Recently, Kerala became the first state in India to declare Internet a basic human right and that all citizens should have access to Wi-Fi. After making the announcement, the state government said it would look to provide free Internet access across the state. The move is in line with the direction provided by the UN, which believes all people must be able to access the Internet to exercise their right to freedom of expression and opinion.
Now, let’s take a look at New Delhi, the capital of the country. In February 2015, the ruling Aam Aadmi Party, led by Arvind Kejriwal, added 100% free Wi-Fi coverage in Delhi to a slew of promises in its poll manifesto to woo all sections, including the middle-class that had mostly voted for the BJP in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. In February 2016, the IT department did identify 3,000 ‘hot zones’ to provide this free Wi-Fi, but nothing much was done after that. As per reports, the IT department has now set an ‘output target’ of March 2018 to commission Wi-Fi hotspots and an ‘outcome target’ of 1,000 hotspots this fiscal.
In stark contrast, Mumbai has been able to boast not only of being the city with the largest public Wi-Fi service in India, but also one of the largest in the world after Maharashtra chief minister Devendra Fadnavis in January this year announced that 500 Wi-Fi hotspots have gone live across the city under phase 1 of the Mumbai Wi-Fi project. He also announced that 1,200 Wi-Fi hotspots will become active by May 1 this year.
Let’s look at some figures. As per a recent study conducted by industry pioneers iPass and Maravedis Rethink, we have 31,518 Wi-Fi hotspots in the country, and the number is expected to grow beyond 2.02 lakh by 2018. In comparison, France has 13 million hotspots, the US has 9.8 million and the UK has 5.6 million hotspots. To reach the global benchmark of one Wi-Fi hotspot for 150 people, India needs about eight lakh new hotspots. As far as the global Wi-Fi market goes, its size was estimated to be over $1.5 billion in 2015, with over 47 million public hotspots deployed.
Things are, of course, looking up in India. In a major push to the government’s ‘Digital India’ campaign, the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) is planning to deploy Wi-Fi across the country. If implemented, this will provide Internet access to people at an affordable cost. As per reports, the regulatory body will rope in small entrepreneurs, communities, individuals and organisations to provide high-speed Internet.
The initial plan is to offer Internet at 2 paise per MB. This is much lower than 10 paise per MB that prevails in the mobile telecom market. Trai will file its recommendation on the issue and put it in front of the ministry soon, as per reports. The regulatory body will also try to make the transfer from mobile data to Wi-Fi convenient for customers by removing unnecessary authentication steps. This is billed as the key feature that will pave the way for the plan’s success.
Under another new initiative, dubbed ‘Digital Village’, the central government has reportedly pledged to supply free Wi-Fi to 1,050 villages across the country. Over the next few months, the government will install tower-mounted Wi-Fi hotspots in remote locations across the country, enabling villagers to connect to the service using their cellphones, say reports. Some reports say Indian, as well as global Internet providers, are queuing up for the project, which aims at connecting more than 900 million people in the country. The government is apparently allocating $62 million (over `400 crore) in the initial phase of the project, before it is expanded to the entire country.
With Wi-Fi becoming commonplace, there is one area, though, where it needs some clarity—inside a mid-air flight. That will hopefully change too, as senior aviation officials have hinted that passengers will be able to use Wi-Fi while flying in Indian airspace soon. Taking the lead is Air India, the country’s national carrier, which is planning to have Wi-Fi onboard its Airbus A-320 planes—the mainstay of its domestic operations—after July this year. Once that happens, other Indian airlines might follow suit. It is speculated that the services might start with a smaller data package—enough to send and receive mails, and communicate through WhatsApp—and later move on to larger packages that other leading international airlines offer.
While India might still be a long way from, say, Dubai Airports’ ‘WOW-Fi’—which offers a top speed of up to 100 Mbps to millions of passengers waiting for their flights—when it comes to free public Wi-Fi, at least the country has made a start.