Trai Nixes Operators' Plea to Scrap Public WiFi, Caps Tariff

The regulator has capped PDO tariffs at twice the retail rate for broadband up to 200 Mbps

- Jatin Grover

The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) has rejected operators' demand to scrap the public WiFi project and has moved to cap bandwidth tariffs, dealing a setback to telecom companies.

Operators cannot charge public data offices (PDOs) more than twice the retail tariff for fibre broadband services with speeds up to 200 Mbps, Trai said in its new tariff order.

Under the Prime Minister Wi-Fi Access Network Interface (PM-Wani) project, public data offices (PDOs) are small, local shops that buy internet bandwidth from operators to resell as public WiFi hotspots and 5-10-a-day internet sachets in rural and other areas.

"This pricing framework has been designed to appropriately balance the interests of all stakeholders by ensuring affordability for small-scale Public Data Offices (PDOs) while also providing economic incentives to service providers," Trai said in its Telecommunication Tariff (Seventy First Amendment) Order, 2025.

PM-Wani, launched in 2020, has been struggling to take off because of the high pricing charged by telecom operators and internet service providers.

The Centre targeted 10 million public WiFi hotspots across the country by 2022, and 50 million by 2030, but according to government data, only about 333,215 hotspots have so far been deployed, with Delhi alone accounting for 50%.