Google free high speed Wi-Fi is now set up in Ten railway stations in collaboration with Railtel. Google in collaboration with Railtel, as a part of Digital India Initiation program announces that the service will be available at 100 stations by the end of the year.
- Mumbai
- Bhopal
- Bhubaneswar
- Ernakulam Jn
- Kacheguda
- Raipur
- Ranchi
- Vijaywada
- Vishakhapatnam
- Pune
Railtel is the telecom arm of Indian Railways and Google India. Streaming of high Definition videos besides online searches, new games or e-book downloads will make the passengers trains wait delightful with this service. Passengers can also order food using a range of apps as they pass through major stations
The service is launched on Sunday at Bhubaneswar railway station by Railway Minister Mr. Suresh Prabhu and Minister of state for Railways Manoj Sinha. The facility benefits 1.4 lakh visitors daily at Bhubaneswar station. Mr. Prabhu said the service will be shortly launched in Puri and Cuttack railway stations of the state. He added a detail that the service will be made available in Puri before the Puri Jagannath Chariot (Rath Yatra) in July this year, and Cuttack station is facilitated by the end of the year.
Officially said that the service will be available round the clock, but sources in the East Coast Railway said that they might put a time limit for the service. The service is available now for all the smartphone users in 9 other railway stations: Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam, Kacheguda (Hyderabad), Ernakulam (kochi), Bhopal, Ranchi and Raipur. The service will accessible from next week at Jaipur, Ujjain and Allahabad railway stations.
Google says the expansion will allow 1.5M people every day to access the web with no charge. It hopes to reach 90 more stations this year and eventually cover 300 more. To connect India to the Internet is the initiated by CEO Sundar Pichai outlined last December. Past month, the managing director for South East Asia and Indian Rajan Anandan stated that the company was in talk with the local telecom service providers to begin testing project Loon.
The service can be accessed by passengers and visitors by selecting “Railwire” network and then browse railwire.co.in after that the user need to enter the mobile number on the login screen and click “Receive SMS”. A four digit code is generated and sent to the registered mobile number which will enable the user to use the free Wi-Fi service on entering the code.
“The loopholes in the service since its launch at Mumbai central are plugged,” said Mr. R. K. Bahuguna Chairman and Managing Director of Railtel. “Passengers can now access high-speed Internet through our optical fibre communication network. With our partnership with Google, we are confident of rolling out a robust service at railway stations in the country,” said Mr. Bahuguna.
“We are scaling up our efforts to roll out quickly to cover some of the smaller stations where connectivity is limited. As internet adoption grows in India, easy and affordable access to high-speed networks is the real need of the hour. With 100 stations live, this project will be the largest publicly accessible high speed Wi-Fi network in the country, but our real hope is that this project will set new benchmarks in delivering reliable and consistent connectivity in the country,” Gulzar Azad, Head of Access Project, Google India, said.
