With over 1.2 billion mobile subscribers and some of the lowest-cost data plans, does India really need public Wi-Fi?
That’s the issue at the heart of a battle between India's telecom operators and technology lobby groups: whether government funds should be used to expand public Wi-Fi networks in the country. At the centre of the dispute is Digital Bharat Nidhi (DBN) fund, formerly Universal Services Obligation Fund, which was created in 2002 to bridge the digital divide.
Telecom companies Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea, which contribute to the fund, have told the regulator that India's cheap and widespread mobile internet has made large-scale public Wi-Fi unnecessary. They said the fund should instead be used to improve mobile network coverage in underserved areas and that it is unfair to subsidize public Wi-Fi providers that do not contribute to the fund.
In contrast, the Broadband India Forum (BIF) and smaller public Wi-Fi companies have said funding support through DBN is needed to help Wi-Fi networks reach rural and remote areas where private investment is often not viable. They contend that public Wi-Fi can complement mobile networks and help bring affordable internet access to more people.
“TSPs (telecom service providers) have contributed the overwhelming majority of the corpus through mandatory levies. TSPs should, therefore, be primary beneficiaries of DBN deployment and should not be required to fund, through their levies, a competing ecosystem that operates without equivalent obligations,” the Cellular Operators Association of India (COAI) told the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai) in its submission on a recent consultation paper on the growth of public Wi-Fi. COAI represents private telecom operators.
Telecom operators give 8% of their adjusted gross revenue (AGR) as regulatory levies to the government, of which 3% is licence fee and 5% is contribution to DBN. DBN had a fund of ₹1.06 trillion at the end of March, as per its website.
Reviving PM-WANI
The regulator is examining ways to revive the Prime Minister’s Wi-Fi Access Network Interface (PM-WANI) programme launched in December 2020 to promote the use of public Wi-Fi hotspots. Under PM-WANI, people can buy data sachets for ₹5 or ₹10 per day and use the internet in areas where such public hotspots are available.
However, the programme has fallen far short of its ambitious targets. As of April, about 410,000 PM-WANI hotspots had been deployed across the country—far below the government's earlier targets of creating 10 million public Wi-Fi hotspots by 2022 and 50 million by 2030.
BIF, which represents companies such as Google, Meta, Amazon, and Netflix, rejected the argument that widespread 4G and 5G coverage has made public Wi-Fi redundant, saying that a "mobile-first" approach should not translate into a "mobile-only" ecosystem. According to BIF, public Wi-Fi complements—rather than competes with—mobile networks by offloading data traffic and easing network congestion.
“The Authority may consider recommending that DBN eligibility criteria and disbursement frameworks be explicitly extended to support last-mile backhaul and hotspot infrastructure for Public Wi-Fi deployment, with particular focus on rural Gram Panchayats, semi-urban areas and underserved communities where market-led investment is unlikely to emerge independently in the near term,” BIF said in its submission to Trai.
According to R.S. Sharma, former chairman of Trai, PM-WANI's weak rollout is the result of challenges such as policy delays, opposition from telecom operators, the absence of a dedicated agency to coordinate the ecosystem and inadequate last-mile connectivity via BharatNet, a government project to provide broadband connectivity to all Gram Panchayats.
In his response to Trai, Sharma also pointed to hardware constraints, noting that most existing broadband routers are not PM-WANI compliant and that the domestic manufacturing ecosystem for such devices remains underdeveloped.
Remove the friction
“The fix is therefore not to centralize or re-architect PM-WANI; it is to remove the friction that is suppressing its growth, integrate it with BharatNet through a clean three-player model, and create the governance scaffolding that allowed UPI to scale,” Sharma said in a letter dated 12 May. UPI refers to Unified Payments Interface, a facility that allows users to transfer money online between bank accounts.
Telecom operators have largely opposed any tweaks to the PM-WANI framework, citing higher mobile data penetration, its lower cost and cybersecurity issues over public Wi-Fi networks.
“India, in fact, has among the lowest mobile data tariffs in the world, in the range of about ₹8 per GB, and the majority of customers are on fixed monthly plans, so a shift of consumption to Wi-Fi yields no cost saving for them,” Reliance Jio told Trai.
“Because high-speed, low-cost mobile data plans are already universally available from TSPs, the demand for public Wi-Fi will never grow at the scale originally envisioned by the government,” Vodafone Idea said.
BIF argued that 70-80% of data consumption occurs indoors, where mobile networks often face coverage limitations. It also highlighted the cost advantage of Wi-Fi, estimating that while mobile broadband costs about ₹8.18 per GB, public Wi-Fi backed by fibre can reduce costs to ₹1-2 per GB and even ₹0.27 per GB in high-usage scenarios.
Stakeholders' suggestions
To improve public Wi-Fi in India, some operators of PM-WANI, along with BIF, have suggested that internet providers update existing home and office routers so they can also work as public Wi-Fi hotspots, without needing any new equipment. They called for a single national organization—similar to the National Payments Corporation of India, which operates the UPI platform—to run and coordinate the system and set common rules.
To make it easier for users, they propose simpler log-in methods that don’t require downloading of apps or multiple verification steps, while asking for resolution of right of way challenges with less cost of infrastructure deployment.
Last month, the department of telecommunications upgraded the PM-WANI public Wi-Fi system to make it simpler and more user-friendly. The reforms include QR-based logins for devices, short-duration plans of 15, 30 and 60 minutes, and standardized hotspot names for easier identification.