Government to invest Rs 10,000 crore to set up more rural Wi-Fi hotspots

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Moneycontrol News

Every gram panchayat will have five Wi-Fi hotspots instead of the earlier planned two hotspots to ensure a better proliferation of high-speed rural broadband.

As per a report by Mint, these Wi-Fi hotspots will be available to the public in rural areas. They will also connect social institutions like schools, post offices, police stations, health centres, etc.

“The earlier tender was for Rs 4,000 crore and at that time it was decided to set up two Wi-Fi hotspots per gram panchayat. Now we want to set up five hotspots per gram panchayat. The new tender will now be for Rs 10,000 crore.This should happen in a week,” an anonymous source quoted in the report said.

The person also added that the revised budget still needs to be approved by the Telecom Commission.

On May 1, the Department of Telecommunication (DoT) had released a draft policy for public opinion, with a target of attracting around $100 billion investments in digital communications by 2022.

The policy aims at providing universal broadband at 1 Gbps to all gram panchayats by 2020 and increase it to 10 Gbps by 2022. The DoT also intends to deploy 5 million public Wi-Fi hotspots by 2020 and increase them to 10 million by 2022.

These hotspots would run on BharatNet or the erstwhile National Optical Fibre Network. The government has already laid optical fibre across 1,00,000 gram panchayats and intends to cover all the gram panchayats by March 2019 with the participation of the private sector.

DoT has also recommended setting up Public Data Offices (PDOs) who will buy data from the internet service providers and sell it to the public in small packs, starting at Rs 2. While the Telecom Commission has approved this recommendation, it has asked DoT to come up with an operational framework to roll out this plan.