Free Wi-Fi in city never reach users

Hyderabad: Launched with much fanfare to catapult Hyderabad on to the global smart-city map, the free 'Public Wi-Fi' initiative of the Telangana government in association with Bharti Airtel has failed to enthuse tech-savvy denizens of Hitec City.

Though two months have passed since the launch of the free Wi-Fi service, many of the residents of Madhapur and Kothaguda say they are unaware of it.

Also, many others complain that the network frequently throws up messages like 'Insufficient volume quota', 'Unable to continue with registration' etc. and when it gets connected, the access to internet is extremely slow, discouraging them from using the service.

They also say that they often get kicked off from the network in just 30 minutes and see a 'Quota exceeded' message when they try to re-login.

Akash, a software engineer, says that he is not aware of availability of free Wi-Fi in Madhapur and then pulls out his mobile to try connecting to the network only to get denied access due to insufficient volume quota.

'If the service was good, we would have known about it by word of mouth,' he smiles. Another techie Harish says that the signal of the free Wi-Fi network has been very bad in various parts of the area.

'I tried logging in from my room near Image hospital and my office at Kothaguda. It would disconnect quite often. So, I stopped connecting to it,' he adds. Swarnendu Ghosh, who resides at Ayyappa Society, feels that the government or Airtel should have advertised more about the initiative. 'I'm glad to know we have free Wi-Fi here.

It's a true sign of a global city. But simply having a service without no one using it is meaningless,' he says. A senior official of the IT department of Telangana government, on condition of anonymity, says that the initiative was launched just as a pilot project and the government would consider the citizens' feedback before expanding the services to rest of the city.

'Such hiccups are not uncommon for technological initiatives, especially those reaching lakhs of people. We will look into the complaints and ensure that a fool-proof model is developed,' he says.

The official adds that the carriers should come up with only realistic proposals and not un-implementable ones. 'Many people approach the minister with grand ideas and models from New York and Sao Paulo. They have to understand that such models cannot be replicated in India given our peculiar situation and problems.

They would simply back off when we call for Expression of Interest,' he said, adding that they are advising the service providers to do a thorough study and come up with sustainable revenue models.

The official informed that IT Minister K T Rama Rao has taken up the Wi-Fi project very prestigiously and is constantly asking officials to develop plans to extend the service to the Old City also.

However, Bharti Airtel claims that they got positive feedback from citizens for the 'Public Wi-Fi' initiative. 'We have received overwhelming feedback from citizens on the convenience enjoyed by them in the last few months.

Alongside, we will also look at working with the State government as and when they invite tenders to expand services,' said a spokesperson of the telecom company. However, the company declined to provide details on the number of users served, overall data limits per day and complaints received, among others.