The Final Word

Why the Wi-Fi revolution failed in India

Prashant L Rao, does a post-mortem of India’s Wi-Fi scene

Reams of newsprint have been printed about how Wi-Fi will free us all from the tyranny of being chained to our desks. Let’s be fair, the thought of being able to work anywhere, anytime is tempting. Unforunately the Indian experience has turned out to be far from heavenly. The wireless revolution has run into the ground in this country. If this seems too drastic a statement let’s look at the facts favouring or disproving this assertion.

On the face of it the two hundred plus hot spots in India don’t seem too bad a number. That’s until you realise that 96 percent of these Wi-Fi zones are located in Bangalore. Worse, India has less than one percent of the globe’s fifty-five thousand hot spots.

Of course, this doesn’t take into account the various corporate wireless projects that attempt to unwire campuses, manufacturing plants and sales offices. The wireless pilots that have been conducted are laudable but limited to a few well heeled companies that can afford to roll out Wi-Fi in select zones.

So what’s holding Wi-Fi back? For starters, the first hurdle is at the access layer where the high cost of Wi-Fi enabled notebooks prevents individuals from going mobile when it comes to their computing and restricts the extent of corporate Wi-Fi deployments. Consider this, a wireless notebook costs a whopping Rs 60,000 to 80,000. While you can slip a wireless card into a desktop PC, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to do so. Wireless LANs are still slower than wired ones and the equipment is more expensive.

It gets worse, Indians pay more for wireless access than almost anybody else. As per IDC, India generates the highest average income from each hot spot among APAC countries. This is a direct result of the ridiculously high rates that star hotels charge for Wi-Fi access.

Is there a way out of this quagmire? Several things need to happen. The price points of access devices need to drop. One way to achieve this would be to offer wireless connectivity on budget notebooks. Better yet, handhelds with wireless access could do the trick. At the same time, the number of hot spots in all the major cities (to start with) will have to match that of Bangalore. Prices for using hot spots will have to drop, remember how few people used mobile phones when it cost Rs 16 per minute to make a call?

My take on Wi-Fi is:

• All notebooks will ship with Wi-Fi in a few years
• The cost of wireless access will drop as ISPs roll out Wi-Fi as a value-added service at their cyber cafe chains

The author can be reached at prashant@expresscomputeronline.com