WiOM – A torch bearer for PM WANI

Wiom was started as incubation at IIT Delhi

Satyam has served on the Board of many companies including BASIX- SubK, Labournet, Kinara, Sonata, Arohan, and IntelleGrow. He worked with American Express, managing new products and portfolio risk in various international markets including Japan, Hong Kong, and Germany.

He has served on various GOI-appointed committees, including the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC).

He was also the Director of the Michael & Susan Dell Foundation’s Family Economic Stability portfolio managing an investment portfolio of 15+ high-impact companies in the area of livelihoods for the poor.

Among the private WiFi operators that have successfully set up WiFi networks, Wiom is one of the largest and fastest-growing public data aggregators PDOA, in the country.

Wiom is catering to the needs of middle- and lower-income localities.

Wiom was started as an incubator at IIT Delhi.

Its founders have a strong IIT – IIM background. Satyam Darmora, Nishit Aggarwal, Ashutosh Mishra, Natraj Akella, and Maanas Dwivedi have worked in companies like Microsoft, American Express, IBM

and Airtel.

Wiom started with the objective of providing affordable Internet to the masses. Using cutting-edge technology that reduces cost drastically, and shared economy principles, Wiom has over the years created a unique business model that is highly scalable and profitable.

While all internet delivery interventions in the past have been using a piping approach, where the ISP owns the infrastructure and the customer, Wiom created a model with a platform approach, where the focus is on demand-supply match than being an infrastructure player.

Since most of the PDO partners of Wiom come from low-income areas and are distributed in various parts, the internet bandwidth is procured from the existing ISPs in the area. Wiom’s Wi-Fi management platform has been created especially for the Indian context. Hence, it can work with a normal broadband connection and does not require leased lines. Also, there is no need for any integration with different ISPs. Since Wiom is able to create more demand in bulk, it is able to get discounted rates from ISPs which are generally 25% lower than the standard market rates.

Kusumpur Pahadi Context

With the advent of PM WANI, we picked up an area called Kusumpur (in Delhi) as a pilot market and set up ~180 PDOs in the first phase.

Kusumpur is a low-income locality close to the Vasant Vihar metro station. It has approximately 5,000 households and 25,000 residents. Most of the families have adults engaged in daily labor or blue-collar jobs. In this phase, Wiom had to pick up the entire cost of setting up PDO – including the internet and Routers.

Users could buy coupons from neighborhood shops for internet access. These were.

•             Rs. 5: Unlimited internet for a day. Eligibility on 1 device only.

•             Rs. 20: Unlimited internet for 5 days. Eligibility on 1 device only.

•             Rs. 50: Unlimited internet for 20 days. Eligibility on 1 device only.

Wiom also provided basic marketing support to these shop owners (pink danglers in the image below) to help market the PDO model.

Benefits to the consumer on connecting to the shop’s Wi-Fi

Consumers would buy coupons from shop-owners and would use the coupon codes to get access to the internet on hotspots.

If a customer brought a coupon from one shop and wanted to use the internet at some other hotspot location, he was able to do so.

Consumers with houses in close proximity to these shops could also access the shop’s WiFi signal from homes and enjoy the internet at home

Key learnings

4G is not sufficient and High demand for unlimited data

More and more people wanted better accessibility of WiFi signals in homes.

Only 10% of homes in the neighborhoods had broadband access

Wiom also carried out a third-party independent assessment and its findings are also attached.

Satyam Darmora, Founder, i2e1 (WiOM) 

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