Mumbai: Slums corner lion’s share of free WiFi at hotspots

VK Gautam, principal secretary of the state’s Information Technology department, attributed this usage pattern to the lack of Internet access in suburban slums.

“Most of the slums dwellers don’t have the facility of Internet but they have now found our services comfortable and are sure to use it,” Gautam said. Government officials said the initiative would help “eradicate the digital divide” in the city.

On January 9, two days before the code of conduct was announced ahead of elections across the state, Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, in a series of tweets, announced the ‘Mumbai WiFi’ project. The state government officially launched free WiFi access connecting 510 hotspots across Mumbai under the smart city project. “Happy browsing,” the CM tweeted.

According to the IT department, official figures of users and usage indicate a steadily rising trend. “During our trial phase between January 2-8 about 500 GB of data was being used by about 23,000 users. In the next four days it rose to 1 TB of consumption per day. 1 Terabyte (TB) is equal to about 1,000 Gigabytes (GB). Officials said that by January 14 the per day usage increased to 1.5 TB and now stands at more than 2.5 TB each day,” said an IT official.

State government officials claim that the WiFi network has a capability of providing services to 65,000 users at a time. But on the afternoon of January 24 there were only 2,312 users active. By 1.30 pm on January 24, 1.4 TB of data had been used.

Of the 17,003 persons who had logged on to the network on Wednesday, 15,000 were connected via mobile phones, another consistent trend.

The week-long analysis of usage accessed by The Indian Express shows that 16.2 TB was used by 90,499 unique or repeat users and around 27,000 new users, the latter referring to those who only logged on to the state’s free WiFi network once. The information indicates that Chembur tops the list with the highest repeat users.

“In the suburban slums there a lot of people who don’t have access to the Internet. We believe that a lot of them are downloading videos and apps and then updating their apps, all which consume a lot of data,” Gautam said.

Ever since a railway police constable told him of free Internet, Mankhurd-based videographer Hussain Khan (35) works from the platforms of Mankhurd railway station. “I mainly use the free WiFi to work and have asked my employees to use the facility. However, over the past week, the platforms have become more crowded and the foot-over-bridge more congested mainly with youth who are downloading videos,” says Khan.

According to Gautam, once a user logs on to the network, there is a firewall that restricts browsing to websites that are legal. By May 1 next year, the government will extend the free WiFi services across 1200 hotspots.