India is planning to give free WiFi to 1050 villages, page-13

WiFi roll-out of the above program is slated to cost $62 million for 1050 villages, piggybacking on top of existing and planned infrastructure spend.

This will only provide basic internet access, as well as education and medical related services. So likely for the user who wants access to play games using data or watch video/use social media, the service will be limited in scope.

Government projections of expenditure and roll-out time frames are usually inefficient and end up costing more and taking longer than expected, but if you were to attempt to expand this service across the whole of India, especially parts where there is no existing infrastructure, cost are likely to exceed $50 billion and take a number of years. The government is unlikely to take on this sort of investment alone, if private investment is required then what will be the monetisation strategy of the WiFi services? 5G standards will be ratified around 2019, with public roll-outs occurring after 2020. Will it be cheaper to get 5G infrastructure in place, or WiFi across the whole of India, when roll-out timeframes will likely overlap?

Since Freeway is live in India, and this WiFi service is not, I believe it will be likely that Syntonic will gain a foothold in users looking to access free data recharges to use however they like, before this proposed WiFi service has been expanded enough to make a dent in the potential Freeway userbase.

Other questions would be security of public unsecured WiFi for a mass population, as well as service quality for a large number of users accessing each hotspot at the same time. Existing telcos are also likely to be quite protective of their territories if WiFi plans encroach on their userbases.

It is likely that if these WiFi access points are intended for basic services/education/health, then Freeway can co-exist within the same regions as a means of accessing recharges for data that is free to be used as the user likes. If public WiFi brings more users online and encourages more people to use mobile phones, then the potential market for Freeway will likely actually grow.