Public Wi-Fi in India: Opportunities and risks

WITH BROADBAND penetration within homes showing limited growth opportunities due to lack of investment, public Wi-Fi will have an interesting role to play in connecting the ever growing data users.

- Ankush Kumar

With the advent of smartphones and rise in social media, connectivity is becoming extremely important in today’s world. The Indian youth, business professionals and travelers want to stay connected all the time through their devices, irrespective of their location. This rising trend of 24/7 connectivity along with the Indian government’s aim of developing smart infrastructure where almost everything will be connected through the internet has made public Wi-Fi a necessity.

Wi-Fi has gained global acceptance as a smarter alternative to wired LANs. Today, Wi-Fi facilities are not only limited to metro cities and few tourist destinations but are freely available in coffee shops, airports, train stations, hotels, college campuses and various public establishments.

Opportunities for all

At present there are over 31,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots installed in India and industry estimates cite that the number is pegged to grow beyond 202,000 by 2018. However, for India to match the current global average of one public Wi-Fi hotspot per 150 people, an additional 800,000 hotspots need to be deployed. This is certainly not a stretch, as China, with the same population, but with better mobile and fixed line broadband infrastructure has more than one million hotspots.