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Though the government says 100 percent of India's villages have been electrified, this does not translate to electricity in every home. Needless to say, that presents a challenge in bringing the populace online. On the other hand, while Jio's entry has forced the telcos into a tariff war that has made data costs in India the lowest in the world, Internet access remains out of reach of a certain section of the country due to economic reasons. UK-based BuffaloGrid, which has been working in India for a few years now, believes it has a solution that can fix both the problems.
At the heart of the company's solution is a battery-powered box that acts as the hub. This hub lets people charge their smartphones — for free for a limited time, with a pay-to-charge model once the free quota is over. The hub is also connected to the Internet, and in coordination with a bunch of additional access points, it creates a Wi-Fi network in the neighbourhood.
He explains that users can connect to this Wi-Fi network and use the Internet, also via a freemium model. With that said, local network usage — i.e. connecting to users and services within the same network — is free without limits, and the company believes it can use this to keep costs low for end-users while bringing partners on board to monetize the service. He promises to share more details soon, with the optimism that the monetization plan will help the company establish itself as a viable alternative to the telcos.
Fogg says the company has 11 hubs active across the country right now — with another “155 hubs coming off the production line” — and Airtel has also provided the cellular connectivity to connect these hubs to the Internet, though Fogg says the company plans to use fibre in the future.
Fogg says the company has also worked closely with Idea and Vodafone in the past, but with plans to apply for an Internet Service Provider (ISP) license in India, that will likely change soon. He also gives a glimpse of what the on-network services might entail, without ever getting into the specifics.
“Going forward, we've seen this opportunity where there's a huge number of rural consumers who are not connected, don't have access to the Internet, and have very poor access to power. And using a combination of different solutions — some of it sitting on the government fibre network, and after some of it using mesh networking, some of it is completely offline and not connected to the Internet at all — we think we can build a network which is effectively independent of the Internet, connect it in, bring people online the way that they're currently not,” he explains.
“India's economic success and development are vital to the global economy, to UK interests across South Asia and to global priorities like the sustainable development goals,” says Crispin Simon, Her Majesty's Trade Commissioner for South Asia. “Trade, investment, and entrepreneurship are the backbones of the UK-India future partnership and I am hopeful that both countries will take advantage of these opportunities.”
With competition among telcos driving data prices lower than ever and the government's active electrification push, one would think that the need for a company like BuffaloGrid isn't probably what it might have been in a pre-Jio world. But Fogg remains optimistic about the future.