Thailand’s nationwide free Wi-Fi project has failed to meet rollout deadlines and the ICT Ministry has returned money it took from the universal service obligation fund.
The ICT ministry has paid back $29 million (950 million baht) to the regulator’s USO fund about a month after it emerged that the ICT Free Wi-Fi project had stagnated and had no hope of meeting its roll-out targets.
The project, signed off in October 2013, was to have 150,000 access points in at least 30,000 public sites in three years.
The ICT Ministry had in turn given the project to state telco TOT. The ICT Ministry’s excuse was that the funds were insufficient for the scope of the project and that there was not enough existing infrastructure for rural deployment.
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