05 July 2018, India:
According to an Economics Times report, Google is reportedely planning to expand its free WiFi services to public places such as malls, universities and cafes.
“Telcos are something we are definitely talking to for things like Wi-Fi coverage and data offload to decongest networks. Those are the reasons why telcos want to be in this space. Wi-Fi is in the nascent stages here,” K Suri, director, partnership, India (Next Billion Users) at Google India, told ET.
K Suri added, “Whosoever is interested in public Wi-Fi ecosystem, we are engaging with them to drive the access. Our philosophy is: how do we connect the next billion?”
K Suri further said, “We worked on our strengths in ad play to see we can show at logins in a seamless way. We did that so we can monetise the parts of the Wi-Fi, therefore it becomes a sustainable model. We can bring a lot of our technology to bear on it and solve the sustainability problem essentially.”
When asked about plans of public WiFi, Suri said, “People aren’t really willing to pay for the public Wi-Fi services. These are early stages of Wi-Fi ecosystem. We currently want to pilot with what we know can work, and are constantly looking at”ways.”
Suri said that Google is “constantly looking at more opportunities”, and can roll the free WiFi service at more railway stations.
The report stated that Trai has already given recommendations for creating public data office aggregators (PDOA) and public data office (PDO) who should be allowed to provide internet access through Wi-Fi technology, even without taking a licence.
(Source – ET report, Image – Glassdoor)
