Google And Cisco To Provide Free And High-Speed Public Wi-Fi In India

According to Cisco’s announcement earlier this week, the company is joining hand with Google to roll out high-speed and free Wi-Fi in 200 areas in India in the next two months. All of the locations are in Bengaluru, the city dubbed India’s high-tech hub.

The areas getting the public Wi-Fi, powered by Google Station, will be the ones with a high volume of traffic, including hospitals, government buildings, and bus stations. For the time being, these targeted areas are struggling to maintain a stable connection for hundreds, even thousands of people at the same time.

As we speak, 25 of these areas have already had free and high-speed Wi-Fi, as a result of Cisco-Google collaboration. However, 200 is nowhere near what the project aims at. In Bengaluru alone, it aims at 500 zones, before expanding to other regions in the country.

The rollout of free Wi-Fi in India is part of a larger plan of the two companies to offer reliable and sustainable connection to regions with limited opportunity to connect to the Internet. The ultimate goal is to give one billion people the chance to thrive in the digital economy.

According to Cisco, there are only 15,000 Wi-Fi hotspots in India, a far too small figure compared with the minimum of 4 to 6 million to be able to rival the global markets.

This collaboration to roll out free Wi-Fi in Bengaluru may remind you of Google’s 2015 plan to bring stable connectivity to train stations. At that time, most people projected that the company would not stop there.

Sameer Garde, President of Cisco, emphasized that this was a global scheme and India was the first to get the benefit. So we may see similar deployment in some other parts of the world soon.