Govt to set up more rural Wi-Fi hotspots for better broadband connectivity
Published: Jun 21, 2018
By TIOLCORPLAWS News Service
NEW DELHI, JUNE 21, 2018: The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) would soon issue a revised tender, inviting bidders to set up more public Wi-Fi hotspots in every gram panchayat than it had earlier envisaged, to ensure higher proliferation of high-speed rural broadband across the 250,000 gram panchayats.
The earlier tender was for Rs 4,000 cr and at that time it was decided to set up two Wi-Fi hotspots per gram panchayat. Now the DoT want to set up five hotspots per gram panchayat. The new tender would now be for Rs 10,000 cr. Out of the Rs 10,000 cr, almost RS 3,600 cr is expected to come from the govt as viability gap funding. The Wi-Fi hotspots would be available for the public in rural areas and would also connect social institutions such as police stations, primary health centres, schools and post offices.
On May 1, DoT had floated the draft policy for public consultation, with a target of attracting investments of USD 100 bn in digital communications by 2022 apart from offering universal broadband at 50 mbps. It aims to provide 1 gbps connectivity to all gram panchayats by 2020 and 10 gbps by 2022. Other targets include enabling 100 mbps broadband on demand to all key development institutions and deploying 5 million public Wi-Fi hotspots by 2020 and 10 mn by 2022.
Those public Wi-Fi hotspots would ride on BharatNet, earlier called the National Optical Fibre Network, which is the govt's plan to connect 250,000 gram panchayats with rural broadband. The govt has already completed laying optical fibre across 100,000 gram panchayats in the first phase and aims to complete the second phase by March 2019 when it would connect an additional 150,000 gram panchayats with the help of private sector participation.
On May 1, the Telecom Commission had accepted the regulator's recommendations on setting up public data offices (PDOs) along the lines of public calling offices to boost public Wi-Fi hotspots, which could potentially create employment opportunities by having a new category of service providers through PDO aggregators (PDOA). Those “pay-as-you-go” PDOs would buy data from telecom or internet service providers and resell sachet-sized data packs starting at Rs 2.
