Vodafone India is piloting WiFi hotspots in several metros including Mumbai for its subscribers, reports The Economic Times. This initiative is part of the company's Project Spring initiative to improve its data coverage and capacity in emerging markets like India along with Europe, for which the telco is apparently spending around Rs 7,000 crore in India. While the details on this service is still sparse at the moment, the focus here seems to be on crowded areas where data quality generally takes a hit. Through this, Vodafone is probably looking to offload users to WiFi networks, thereby reducing the network congestion and address the growing data consumption on its network. What's also worth noting here is that Vodafone is looking at a one-time authentication process for its subscribers (for each hotspot) rather than re-authenticating them with a username and password every time the user accesses the WiFi network. We feel this would make things much simpler than the existing system of asking users to connect by authenticating using a code sent to their mobile phones, which tends to be unreliable at times. However, this can also turn out to be tricky and we are curious to see how Vodafone will be managing security concerns related to people using this WiFi service. According to the report, Vodafone is yet to decide whether to charge users for this service or keep it free. Note that Aircel CMO Anupam Vasudev had earlier said in a panel discussion that people are typically unwilling to pay for a public WiFi service since they want the…
