400 Indian Railways stations have free WiFi now, says Google

Extending its participation in India's digitisation journey, US technology giant Google has rolled out free public WiFi at 400 Indian Railways stations in collaboration with RailTel. The initiative, under Digital India programme began from Mumbai Central station in January 2016, but now Dibrugarh in Assam got the distinction to become the 400th station to avail WiFi facility today, according to Google statement.
 
Interestingly, 100 of the busiest railway stations across India were brought online within the first year of the project, which enabled 15,000 people to experience internet for the first time every day, informed Google. "With over 8 million monthly unique users connecting to the network, this is a lighthouse project for India and every growing economy that is looking to bring the benefit of connectivity to everyone in their country," Google India Director Partnership Next Billion Users K Suri said.
 
With this success, the project has provided connectivity to millions of unconnected Indians, leveraging on the nationwide optic fibre network backbone created by RailTel, which is the telecom arm of Indian Railways.
 
K Manohar Raja, Executive Director (Enterprise Business) at RailTel, reportedly stated that the herculean task has been able to bridge the experience divide by providing one of the fastest public WiFi networks in the world. 
 
The service, which offers thirty minutes of free access to the internet, witnessed users consuming about 350 MB of data per session on an average. Majority of the users are stated to belong to the age group of 19-34 years, but efforts to help older, and first time users with onground support staff has helped millions to experience the internet for the first time, the statement added.
 
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Notably, Indian Railways is striving hard to provide the passengers across all its zones a world class facility to make their travel experience pleasant.