Connect Fast and Loose while in rails with free WiFi now at 5,500 railway stations in India!

New Delhi, December 07: While the Centre at large is striving to promote digitalization of varied services, the national transporter's digital arm RailTel on Saturday said that the Indian Railwaya has provided free WiFi at 5,500 stations across the country. "Jharkhand's Mahuamilan station, which comes under the East Central Railway zone, has become the 5,500th station to get the facility", it said.

 

 

The Railways began the service of providing free WiFi at its stations from January 2016 from Mumbai Central station, and in a span of 46 months RailTel has extended the service to 5,500 stations across the country. The mission is to provide WiFi at all railway stations.

 

RailTel has roped in partners like Google, Tata Trust, PGCIL for some parts of the project and also got funding from the Department of Telecom USOF for 200 stations. WiFi is being provided under the brand name Railwire, the retail broadband service of RailTel," said CMD of RailTel in a statement.

 

"In October 2019 a total of 1.5 crore user logins in RailWire Wi-Fi services across all stations consuming 10242TB of data was recorded", it added. In September 2016, Google had announced a public WiFi initiative called Google Station. Google plans to expand free WiFi coverage under the initiative to locations such as cafes and malls across India, and later expand worldwide.

 

Further in June 2018, Google announced that it's Free Wi-Fi project is now powering 400 Indian railway stations. As a result, there are now more than 8 million people accessing the internet each month via the project.