40 million new users to get access to public Wi-Fi by the end of 2019 By CIOReview TEAM

40 million new users to get access to public Wi-Fi by the end of 2019

CIOReview TEAM | Monday, 09 July 2018, 05:43 IST

  •  No Image

wifiGoogle has commissioned a report with Analysys Mason which reveals that 40 million new users will be connected to the public Wi-Fi by the end of 2019 in India and around 100 million people will be spending USD 2-3 billion on the handset and broadband connection annually. It will also contribute to the GDP growth, by around USD20 billion between 2017 and 19, and at least USD 10 billion per annum. Last year in India, the number of internet users has grown up to 316 million. To maintain the pace, the tech giant has been in talks with the telecom enterprises and partners to provide public Wi-Fi across India to support the government, under the draft National Digital Communications Policy, to reach 5 million access points in 2020 and 10 million in 2022. The report shows that public Wi-Fi will develop a wider connectivity ecosystem which will be benefitted for users, wireless ISPs, telecom providers, handset manufacturers, and venue owners. Recently, Google with RailTel, a ‘Miniratna’ enterprise of GOI, has accomplished its milestone of deploying free public Wi-Fi at 400 railway station which was initiated in 2015. Google gave some insights regarding the public Wi-Fi in railway stations, around 8 million people used the railway based Wi-Fi every month and on average 350 MB of data, per session, is consumed by the single user on the daily basis.

“India has the second largest population in the world but still there are almost a billion Indians who don’t have access to the internet. There are millions of other life-changing journeys that still haven’t been taken and it is realized that not everyone lives or work near a train station”, said Caesar Sengupta, VP of Google’s Next Billion Team, in the Blog post. It is estimated that there is 36,000 commercial Hotspot available in India whereas in China it is 6.1 million and in Indonesia and Mexico 165,000 each. Other then India, Google is also spreading its station projects to other countries includes Southeast Asia, Latin America and some other countries in this subcontinent. The project is already started deploying the project in the Indonesia and Mexico, said Sengupta.

While talking about the report K. Suri, Google India Director, Partnership, Next Billion Users, said, “Our partnership with RailTel to bring high-speed connectivity to millions of Indians across 400 train stations, today stands as a lighthouse project for the industry and underscores the importance of investing in public Wi-Fi as a crucial step in getting high quality internet to everyone in India”.

Public Wi-Fi will bring opportunity for the mobile operators to offload excess data traffic from cellular networks and deploy advanced technology for ensuring interoperable roaming between cellular and Wi-Fi, stated in the report. Unlike public Wi-Fi strategy, Google has launched several other data friendly apps like Tez app, a mobile payment app for the better and efficient transactions.  

CIO Viewpoint

How To Achieve An Effective Digital Transformation

By Yogendra Singh, Head-IT/SAP, Barista Coffee Company Limited

CXO Insights

No-code platforms: Enterprise-wide Adoption...

By Rahul Murthi, Director at Acies

Unleashing the Potential of IT in Engineering...

By Gyan Pandey, Head - Digital/CDO, Voltas

Low Code and Artificial Intelligence - The...

By Rajan Nagina, Head of AI Practice, Newgen Software Technologies

Facebook