Data from the RTI Act, 2005 shows the number of villages without 4G access fell by three-fourths in four years. BSNL started a scheme to cover these areas, but expanding internet remains hard. Telecom operators spend much money to reach few users, making fiber and tower setup very expensive today.
The past few years have seen a major, but not total, reduction in the lack of internet connectivity in rural areas. Why is it hard to make access more universal?
The story so far: According to data received by The Hindu under the RTI Act, 2005, the number of villages without 4G access in the last four years has declined by three-fourths, a result of a scheme by BSNL to "saturate" all uncovered villages with 4G access. Meanwhile, the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) has yet to finish procedures to approve any satellite internet provider, which would theoretically bring the number of such villages down to zero.
A major reason why rural internet is so hard to deploy at scale is the nature of that scale itself: villages are relatively sparse and India is yet to be urbanised to the extent of many industrialised countries. As such, telecom operators and internet service providers have to spend enormous amounts of money to reach an exceedingly small number of users. Building fiber out to villages, and then setting up phone towers there, is prohibitively expensive, if operators are only guided in their economics by the number of users that such efforts eventually reach.