The Indian Railway’s arm, Railtel, which provides Internet services as RailWire via its extensive fiber network along with Google, on Friday launched the free high-speed public Wi-Fi services at nine railway stations including Bhopal.
At Bhopal station, around 1.5 lakh visitors daily. With this launch, Google has successfully rolled out public Wi-Fi services across ten key Railway Stations now, enabling access to over 1.5 million Indians every day.
Starting with the first launch at Mumbai Central earlier this year, the list of stations now offering public Wi-Fi services includes Pune, Bhubaneshwar, Bhopal, Ranchi, Raipur, Vijayawada, Kacheguda (Hyderabad), Ernakulam Jn (Kochi) and Vishakhapatnam. The service will be formally inaugurated by Minister of Railways Suresh Prabhakar Prabhu soon.
With the addition of Bhopal railway station, the network is now live in ten stations across the country and we are scaling up our efforts to roll out quickly to cover some of smaller stations where connectivity is much more limited. As internet adoption grows in India, easy and affordable access to high-speed networks is the real need of the hour.
The service built over the fiber network of Raitel is designed to offer high speed broadband experience to users. Travelers passing through these stations will now be able to easily stream a high definition video, research their destination, download a book or a new game for their journey.
Google is committed to working with the Indian Railways and Railtel to deliver high-speed Wi-Fi network that will be available to 10 million Indians a day by the end of the year, covering 100 of the busiest train stations in India.