Tata Teleservices is planning to set up 4,000 WiFi hotspots in nine cities across India in the next two years, reports Economic Times. The company started setting up WiFi hotspots at airports, restaurants, cafes and other businesses nine months ago and it currently has 540 of them across the country. This includes WiFi hotspots in Delhi and Hyderabad airports and we have noticed a similar set up in Starbucks across India (a 50/50 joint venture between Starbucks Coffee Company and Tata Global Beverages) as well. The publication quoted Avinash Gabriel, chief operations officer of the WiFi business as saying that the number of logins to its service has increased to 4.4 lakh from 1 lakh in April last year. The average time spent in each session is 40 minutes, with an overall 35 million minutes of usage as of January, up from 18 million minutes in April. Gabriel says that it is easier for Tata Teleservices to set up WiFi hotspots across the country than rolling out 3G and 4G, especially because it has fibre laid out to take care of the bandwidth. Tata Teleservices was the only telco among the qualified bidders that didn’t pick up spectrum either in the 1800MHz band or the 900MHz band during the recent spectrum auction. Speculation doing the rounds then was of Tatas looking to exit the telecom industry altogether with Vodafone being the prospective buyer. By depending on WiFi hotspots, it looks like the company is trying to avoid bidding wars for spectrum. However, the service…
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