WiFi Financial News

reports. The deal positions Qatar Airways as the biggest airline partner to Elon Musk's Starlink.

Priyank Kharge on Sunday discussed rolling out free public wifi zones in Bengaluru. “We plan to have about 5,000 public hotspots in Bengaluru,” Kharge told ET, saying it was a project he initiated as IT/BT Minister over five years ago, but was still stuck where it was. “We will start talking to telecom service as well as broadband service providers,” the IT/BT Minister said, adding that the government planned to roll it out by December. The long pending project is part of the Digital Karnataka goal, aiming to provide wifi access to everyone. With no investment from the government, the earlier plan was to give data free for the first 30 minutes or an hour and charge for use beyond that. In November 2019, the BBMP and ACT Fibernet signed an MoU to make public wifi available in nine months, but it remains a non-starter.

WiFi was pitched by the government as a key driver of broadband coverage, the results aren’t very flattering.India has missed its public WiFi hotspots rollout target by a mile. The count is a paltry 0.5 million, a far cry from the 10-million target by the end of 2022 outlined in the National Digital Communications Policy-2018.