PM Modi’s Big Digital Push: 10,00,000 Public WiFi Hotspots For Cheap Internet For All Indians

Today, PM Modi will take oath as India’s Prime Minister for 2nd term, and the country will witness the biggest such event at Rashtrapati Bhavan, with more than 8000 guests expected to come in.

During this mega-event, PM Modi is expected to announce one major update, which can be hailed as the new Govt.’s first big digital push.

10 lakh WiFi hotspots will be established across India.

Plan For 1 Million WiFi Hotspots By PM Modi

At the forecourt of Rashtrapati Bhavan, PM Modi will take oath as India’s next PM, and this will be the biggest event which Rashtrapati Bhavan has ever witnessed.

During this event, PM Modi is expected to announce the rollout of a mega WiFi project, covering entire nook and corner of India.

In the first phase, 500,000 public WiFi hotspots shall be established across towns and villages, cities and districts for offering dirt cheap Internet with a single click.

This mega WiFi project would be a massive collaboration between all telecom service providers, telecom infrastructure providers and entrepreneurs.

A person close to this development said, “The PM may announce this on the oath-taking day itself. The intention is to increase the number to one million hotspots by the end of 12 months from the date of announcement of roll-out,”

Use Any SIM, and Use Any Wifi Internet At Cheaper Rate

The highlight of this WiFi project is interoperability between service operators: You can be using Vodafone-Idea SIM, but you can connect with Airtel’s WiFi and start using data in no time.

This WiFi network shall be providing cheaper Internet, compared to telecom provider’s SIM based data service.

The service can be used by buying data vouchers, which would be available across various retail shops and kiosks.

Hence, if you are using Vodafone SIM, and buy a small Internet voucher to get connected with an Airtel powered WiFi hotspot, then you will be paying to Vodafone.

In the backend, Vodafone and Airtel will settle the charges via revenue sharing model.

How Will This Work?

Another person close to the development said, “In the first phase, 500,000 hotspots will be brought under this architecture immediately and these will be inter-operable across various telecom operators, internet service providers, mobile virtual network operators and common service centres. Users can be on-boarded through a single click,”

This will gove boost to entrepreneurship as well, as thousands of Public Data Offices or PDOs will be established, from where users can buy small sachets of data at dirt cheap price.

This can be compared with PCOs which we had in the earlier days.

PDOs will buy data in bulk from broadband and telecom firms, and then resell the same to the end-users, via small vouchers.

This plan comes under National Broadband Mission, which aims to establish 10 million such WiFi hotspots across 2022, pan-India.

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