BharatNet Should Become a Common Carrier for India's Public Wi-Fi

Give Public Wi-Fi the Pipes the Public Already Paid For

TAN's position is simple. BharatNet should be run as a common carrier that sells bandwidth to public Wi-Fi operators at capped, transparent wholesale prices. That would let PM-WANI finally deliver cheap, small-ticket internet to every Indian who cannot afford a monthly mobile plan.

Two investments that fail apart India has built two pieces of digital public infrastructure that are each stuck for want of the other.

PM-WANI is an elegant design. Approved by the Cabinet in December 2020, it lets any small shop become a Public Data Office, much like the old public call office. No licence or registration fee is required. A single app finds the nearest hotspot, verifies the user, takes a small payment and connects them across providers.

Yet India has only about 4.27 lakh such hotspots. France has more than 13 million. BharatNet is the opposite problem. Since 2011, it has absorbed more than Rs 48,000 crore - more than five times what Aadhaar cost - to run optical fibre to over 2 lakh gram panchayats.

But it has almost no retail outlets, so the fibre earns little and serves few.

What connects them The missing link is backhaul, the line that connects a hotspot to the wider internet.

According to R.S. Sharma, the former TRAI chairman who helped design the framework, a small Public Data Office has had to pay more for the same fibre connection than a household does. That wipes out the margin on cheap data sold in small amounts.

TRAI's June 2025 order capped a PDO's broadband tariff at twice the retail rate. That is a start, but a cap at twice the household price still leaves the business thin. Run BharatNet as a power-transmission company runs its grid: open to all buyers, at a published wholesale price, with enforceable service standards.

The village kirana could then buy bandwidth cheaply and resell it in small sachets. The student without her own data plan could log on for a few rupees.

The strongest objection The Cellular Operators Association of India makes a serious case.

Telecom operators pay heavy licence fees and spectrum costs, while Public Data Offices pay none. A subsidised public fibre network selling cheap wholesale bandwidth to unlicensed resellers would tilt the market against those who have invested most.

Security is the second concern. Public Wi-Fi without strict KYC could be misused and accountability across thousands of small operators is hard. The weak record so far - fewer than 3% of operators met a July 2026 deadline to standardise their network names - suggests the concern is real.

Why the

position still holds The level-playing-field argument assumes PDOs and telecom operators compete on the same ground. They do not. PDOs hold no spectrum and run on unlicensed bands and they must still buy upstream connectivity.

Their licence-free status reflects their role as retail resellers, the way a PCO owner never needed a telecom licence. Cheap backhaul does not undercut operators' core business. It extends coverage to users who never had a monthly plan to begin with.

The security concern is about compliance, not design. PM-WANI already verifies users through its app. The fix is enforcement through the central registry, not keeping access expensive.