India's ambitious PM-WANI push fails to pick up pace amid major pushback by telcos

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For her efforts, Shyam earns Rs 2,000-Rs 4,000 per month, 40% of which goes to her Internet Service Provider (ISP) and 10% to her Public Data Office Aggregator (PDOA) Vimal Yash Sahwal...

As of July 22, there were only 207,642 Wi-Fi hotspots, 199 PDOAs and 111 app providers across India, showed data from the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (Trai)...

The plight of Shekhawat and many other PDOs was recently brought to focus by Trai, which noted that many times TSPs/ISPs are pushing public Wi-Fi providers to connect to access points using costlier Internet Leased Line (ILL) instead of regular FTTH (Fiber To The Home) connections...

Telecom companies believe there are intrinsic flaws in the PM-WANI model, making it irrelevant amid proliferation of 4G/5G services and availability of data services at the lowest prices in the world...

Now, despite these already competitive retail price points offered by PDOs to consumers, the usage is still dropping, Airtel sees no reason for a retail price intervention being made in the B2B relationship of a TSP and PDO where there is no market failure, the telco said.. Telecom operators believe that the entire positioning and timing of implementing PDO/PDOA structure was flawed...