Indian Railway’s RailTel, which provides internet services, today announced the launch of free high-speed public WiFi service (Railwire) at Mumbai Central railway station in association with Google India. In a press statement, Google Indian and RailTel also announced to expand the WiFi services to cover 100 busiest stations of India by the end of this year and promised to offer the free WiFi services in 400 railway stations across India. Allahabad, Patna, Jaipur and Ranchi’s railway stations are next to get free high-speed public WiFi service.
According to the RailTel, the Railwire WiFi will be available to any user who has a working mobile connection on a smartphone and users will be able to easily stream a high definition videos while they’re waiting, research their destination, or save some videos for offline viewing, download a book or a new game for the journey.
Commenting on the launch, chairman and managing director of Railtel, RK Bahuguna of RailTel said, “Our intent was to fulfil Indian Railway’s vision of providing Railway passengers access to high speed Internet through our Optical fiber communication network. Affordable smartphones have made it possible for the common men to experience the power of Internet. With our partnership with Google, we are very confident of rolling out a robust, scalable service at Railway stations in the near future.”
Rajan Anandan, vice president and managing director, Google South East Asia and India, further added, “We’re delighted to launch India’s first high speed public WiFi service in partnership with Indian Railways. Bringing affordable Internet access to millions of people is an important part of making the Internet both easily accessible and useful for more than 300 million Indians who are already online, and the nearly one billion more who are not. By end of this year over 10 million people will be able to enjoy this experience at 100 stations spread across the country. I would like to thank the Indian Railways for their support and vision to provide a world class high speed public WiFi network at the stations.”