Wifi Dabba

My thanks to Wifi Dabba for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. I’ve never had a sponsor quite like Wifi Dabba — they’re looking for investors in the DF audience, not customers.

India is a huge battleground — maybe the battleground — for the soul of the open internet. Remember Facebook Basics from a few years ago, where Facebook tried to effectively own “the internet” in India with an offering that pretty much just offered Facebook’s own services? It didn’t work, but they’re back, having recently purchased a nearly $6 billion stake in India’s largest telco. The root problem is the extreme expense required to deploy broadband. High costs naturally favor nation-states and existing telecom monopolies.

Wifi Dabba is attempting to solve India’s broadband problem from the bottom up. They’ve spent the last three years reinventing the network stack to lower the cost of broadband internet access. They use lasers instead of expensive underground fiber, and commodity components across the stack. This results in a network that is 100 times cheaper to deploy and 10 times cheaper for customers.

Right now they primarily serve their hometown of Bangalore, but are looking to expand nationwide. Their investors include YCombinator, VY Capital, and others — and they are looking for additional investors.

Buy a piece of their network and own the future of internet access in India.

★ Sunday, 23 August 2020