The Access Code Rewritten

Under the government’s nose to maintain the sanctity of net neutrality and ‘gated’ principles of Facebook’s Free Basics for the farce called affordable Internet, there are few start-ups that are truly democratizing it.

- Sandeep Soni

The opportunity to bring the next around 1 billion people on the Internet is apparent. What’s not perhaps is the Internet itself. And three critical factors underlying it are speed, cost and reliability, which everyone grapples with. To give it a perspective, in December 2017, Internet testing leader Ookla ranked India at a dismal 109 position in mobile Internet speed. For fixed broadband it was still better – ranked at 76. The average download speed was 8.80 Mbps and 18.82 Mbps respectively. “Every technology business is built on the basic premise of Internet availability. Despite Jio services and highly subsidized data plans, the penetration is far from deep. Also there aren’t enough WiFi hotspots,” says Sheetal Bahl, Managing Director, GrowX Ventures – an early stage technology fund.

THE OPEN SOURCE