Officials want a private partner to deploy the infrastructure and manage the service provisioning
Officials in New Delhi, India, are considering offering residents up to 1 GB per month of free Wi-Fi access, with the first phase to deploy public Wi-Fi in government and private colleges, according to reports.
The Economic Times reports that Ashish Khetan, vice chairman of the Delhi Dialogue Commission, said the second and third phases will cover rural areas and “unauthorized colonies.”
“The minimum speed of the Wi-Fi that we are proposing is 1 Mbps for good user experience and each user should get 1 GB of downloads for a month free. In the first phase, which should not take more than a year to complete, free Wi-Fi will be available in both private and government colleges in Delhi.”
Khetan said that the government would prefer to partner with a private service provider/infrastructure owner rather than taking on the deployment in-house.
“We are also proposing that the government should not own infrastructure and the payment module should be an opex module based on total data consumption. It will ensure government only pays according to actual usage.”
Off the southern tip of India in Sri Lanka, public Wi-Fi is a hot topic.
In June, Sri Lanka Telecom announced a plan to deploy islandwide Wi-Fi with the help of Alepo and Ruckus Wireless.
Similarly, tech giant Google’s ambitious Project Loon is eyeing Sri Lanka as a testbed for its concept of using giant balloons to deliver Wi-Fi.
Sri Lankan leaders and Google are working through a memorandum of understanding and have yet to agree on a rollout strategy.
