YoAccess – Creating world’s largest WiFi Hotspot Network

In today’s world when people are more connected virtually, staying online is the key. With WiFi, hot spots and dongle connections, staying connected seems easier than ever before. But in reality, how much are these options really helping us in staying connected?

Poor connections have always come front as a hindrance. Jaikishan Jalan identified this problem in late 2015, when one day he met a person who was carrying a dongle and still was not able to depend on it reliably for data needs. The person along with Jaikishan then depended on couple of café’s to finally to connect to a WiFi to access internet. This was when it hit Jaikishan that connectivity was a global problem and as a solution to it, came up his startup – YoAccess.

“This was the first time the problem emerged. There was no easy way to discover quality internet nearby, not to mention easily connect to them. In next two years, with smart city projects, India is projected to have about 2Mn public and community WiFi hotspots (v/s about 32K today). Globally, this number is 50 Mn and expected to grow to 380 Mn. However, there is no easy way to discover, connect and pay at these hotspots as higlighted by TRAI as well recently. “quotes Jaikishan when asked the origin of the idea.

At YoAccess, the vision of the team is to help people discover new opportunities and experience by connecting them online. To achieve this, YoAccess is working on creating the world’s largest WiFi hotspot network by aggregating existing WiFi hotspots and provide a seamless experience for users to connect and pay to them.

The startup is a mobile app for people to discover, share and connect to nearby WiFi hotspots. This app allows users to see public & community WiFi near them and allows them to automatically connect to nearby open connections when they are in close vicinity. The users (crowdsourced) add these WiFi hotspots on the app to make it easier for other users to connect to them. JaiKishan started working on the product at nights and started showing to users and few retailers. The response was great and that was when he decided to go onboard full time on March 15, 2016.

YoAccess is pioneered by Jaikishan Jalan who is a B.Tech graduate in CS from IIT (ISM) Dhanbad and a PhD drop out from Iowa State University. He spent about 7+ years in US working with Microsoft, Google and lead engineering at a VC backed startup before returning to India in Nov 2014. After returning, he launched a B2B office supplies startup before starting YoAccess.

How does the app work?

• User can install the app from Google Play Store (iOS App coming soon)
• Once installed, just sign up either through Facebook or Google
• Post signing up, you can see all the WiFi hotspots in your area. The app will automatically connect to any of those WiFi once they are in close vicinity of that hotspot (say 10-25 mtrs)
• You can also share public & community WiFi as you find them to contribute to the app

Other than users sharing public WiFi hotspots, the startup also pairs up with retailers (and eventually with individuals) and ask them to share unused WiFi bandwidth on the YoAccess platform. In return, they give them a SaaS platform with complete user behavior, customer analytics, and ability to engage in the market. This exchange is monetary based. Currently, 1000+ WiFi hotspots is shared by the users globally.

In near future, the startup plans to convert some of their hotspots into premium hotspots which provides a consistent quality internet connection for which they will charge user at 5 paise/MB (v/s ~23 paise MB for 2G/3G/4G).

So now no more worrying about hotspot or WiFi connections near you. Simply log on to YoAccess and get access to all nearby available connections.

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