India Cabinet Approves Setting Up a 'Massive Network' of Public Wi-Fi Hotspots

An anonymous reader shares a report: More than one billion people in India today have a mobile connection, thanks in part to the proliferation of low-cost Android smartphones and the world's cheapest mobile data plans in recent years. This scale was unimaginable just three decades ago, when India had fewer than 2.5 million telephones in the country. One of the earliest and most pivotal efforts that expanded the reach of telephones in the country took place in the late 1980s. That was when the Indian government backed the idea of setting up telephone booths, or public call offices, across cities and towns. No longer did people need to buy expensive telephones, or pay exorbitant fees and bills. A person could just walk to a nearby mom and pop store, place a call for a couple of cents and move on.

On Wednesday, India's cabinet approved a proposal that seeks to replicate the decades-old strategy -- and its success -- with democratizing Wi-Fi in the world's second-largest internet market. India's IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad said that the government will launch PM WANI (Prime Minister Wi-Fi Access Network Interface) to "unleash a massive network in the country." The neighborhood stores that served as public call offices could now be public data offices, he said. To make the program a success, the government will not charge any license or registration fee, he said.

but probably not in Kashmir

[intercision]

Still a nice idea

Re:

[junglee_iitk]

They will be installed. Whether they will actually work or not....

How about

[ArchieBunker]

public toilets?

Re:

[ISayWeOnlyToBePolite]

public toilets?

How about the duck? The Clean India Mission project started in 2014 and phase 1 ended in 2019 with 110 million toilets built https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] You're welcome.

Re:

[ArchieBunker]

Lol at the end it says many chose not to use the new toilets.

Re:

[fbobraga]

stop spreading FUD, friend

Re:

[junglee_iitk]

It is considered natural fertilizer. You purposely edited your sentence to remove "rural". All that crap and you are the biggest piece of shit here.

Surveillance

[codeButcher]

I guess it's easier to do MITM if you don't need to force the ISPs to accommodate your demands via pesky and lengthy legal procedures, but you now are the ISP (and thus the MITM) by default...

5G

[backslashdot]

WiFi is no good for this sort of thing. Itâ(TM)s better to use LTE or 5G to do this.

What could possibly go wrong?

[RogueWarrior65]

Aren't we told NOT to connect to "Public Wifi" for security reasons?

Re:

[kwerle]

Nope.

Wouldn't LTE be a better solution

[chipperdog]

Wouldn't an "open" LTE network be a better solution for a national scale than WiFi? Remember wifi range is measured in units of single feet generally up to a couple thousand feet...LTE is measured in fractions of a mile to miles...and scales to thousands of users much easier, wifi chokes on hundreds of users..