A huge Wi-Fi rollout is soon to begin across nine cities in India, as rocketing smartphone sales have pushed up the demand for internet access.
According to indiatimes.com, Tata Teleservices will launch 4,000 Wi-Fi hotspots over the next two years to ensure that smartphone owners who require access to the internet can get it. Research from the International Data Corporation (IDC) India shows that last year, the smartphone market in India grew by 171 per cent. This means that 44 million devices were shipped in 2013, in comparison, 2012 only saw 16.2 million units shipped.
Avinash Gabriel, chief operations officer of the Wi-Fi business at Tata Teleservices, says in the last nine months data consumption on smartphones has risen dramatically.
“From about one lakh (100,000) logins in April last year, we now have 4.4 lakh (440,000) logins, where the average time spent in each sessions is 40 minutes,” he explains. “So roughly, we’ve clocked 35 million minutes of usage as of January, up from 18 million minutes in April.”
At the moment, Tata Teleservices has around 540 hotspots located around India, mostly in public spaces, such as airports and restaurants, reports bgr.in. All these Wi-Fi connections are brand new, as the firm began to implement them last April. Mr Gabriel explains that Wi-Fi solutions are cheaper to rollout than 4G or 3G networks, which is why mobile companies often prefer them.
