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WANI 3.0: Unleashing Business Innovation and Open Wireless Network Growth for Universal Connectivity

PM-WANI has allowed sachetised access to WiFi connectivity. However, the true vision of WANI standard, where small business owners can participate as network service providers resulting in fast network growth, has not been realised. We propose the next version of the WANI standard where a more open ecosystem can be enabled to facilitate business interactions such as delegated payments and roaming, which in turn can catalyse increased user base, rapid network growth, and business innovations.

The PM-WANI framework is revised periodically, taking into account the new developments, security updates, etc. Version 1.0 was released in 2020 and this was used for the pilot deployments. The updated 2.0 specification was released in 2021 and is the current version in use. You could read more about these versions here. This whitepaper defines iSPIRT’s vision for the PM-WANI Version 3.0 specification

PM WANI 3.0: Unleashing Business Innovation and Open Wireless Network Growth for Universal Connectivity [v.2] from ProductNation/iSPIRT

The blog post and proposal are authored by Saurabh Chakrabarti, Nilesh Gupta, Vishal Sevani, Sharad Sharma, and Himanshu Tyagi on behalf of iSPIRT Foundation. Nilesh Gupta and Himanshu Tyagi are faculty members at the Indian Institute of Management Nagpur and Indian Institute of Science, respectively, and they also represent their views as researchers on the topic.

The authors would like to thank Centre For Development Of Telematics (CDoT) for their detailed discussions and conversations about the workings of PM-WANI. Would also like to thank Bhuvnesh Sachdeva, Shubhendu Sharma, and Satyam Darmora for their insightful comments about the WANI ecosystem.

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iSPIRT’s Official Response to Non-Personal Data Governance Framework

A Committee of Experts under the Chairmanship of Shri. Kris Gopalakrishnan has been constituted vide OM No. 24(4)2019- CLES on 13.09.2019 to deliberate on Non-Personal Data Governance Framework. Based on the public feedback/suggestions, the Expert Committee has revised its earlier report and a revised draft report (V2) has been prepared for the second round of public feedback/suggestions. iSPIRT had provided a past response to the previous report and in this blog post contains a response to the revised report. 

At the iSPIRT Foundation, our view on data laws stems from the following fundamental beliefs: 

  1. Merits of a data democracy (that is, the user must be in charge)
  2. Competitive effects must be well understood, for creation of a level playing field amongst all Indian companies, and some ring-fencing must exist to protect against global data monopolies
  3. Careful design enables both high compliance and high convenience

It is with these perspectives that we have analyzed the revised Non-Personal Data report in our response.

Key Sources of Ambiguity in the NPD Report 

The key sources of ambiguity in the report are: 

  1. Purpose of techo-legal framework for Non Personal Data: The non personal data framework is meant to provide the right legal and technology foundations for world class artificial intelligence to be created out of India for the betterment of financial, health, and other socio-economically important services. The current version of the report sidesteps this completely by constraining the applicability to only “public good” purposes rather than taking a holistic approach to “business & public good purposes” 
  2. Data Business entities need a harmonised definition (given the interplay with data fiduciaries as proposed in the MeitY Personal Data Protection Bill) and clear incentives for participation. The current report relies excessively on regulation & processes for data businesses to achieve the outcome. 
  3. Institutional structure for Data Trustees: The report restricts Data Trustees to government agencies and non-profit organisations; however, in a domain consisting of fast evolving technology by excluding the private sector in offering the base infrastructure creates a severe limitation on the ecosystem of modellers that can be created. 
  4. Technology Architecture: The illustrated technology architecture is unclear around the public infrastructure (through the form of open standards, public platforms, and others) that need to be created & adopted to bring to life the non-personal data ecosystem in an accelerated manner. 

Conclusion

While we’re aligned with the vision of the committee, it’s critical that the above ambiguities are resolved in order to create a strong non-personal data ecosystem created in India. Till these ambiguities are resolved, the recommendations of the Report should not be operationalized.

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