With wi-fi slowly turning into being the oxygen of today’s generation, a wifi enabled railway station is countable as a ‘developed’ station. During the past year and half, almost a dozen stations in India have been enabled with google wi-fi and till nowover 10 million people have experienced high speed internet in various Indian stations.
It all started on September 12 in 2015, when the Indian Railways announced its partnership with the tech giant Google to provide free Wi-Fi services to 400 railway stations across the country. In January 2016, Mumbai central station had become the first railway station in India to have free Wi-Fi facility and further on the service has been extended to quite a few station railway stations. 9 other major railway stations that have got Google enable wi-fi are: Pune, Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Raipur, Ranchi, Vijayawada, Kachiguda (Hyderabad), Ernakulam Junction (Kochi), and Vishakhapatnam.
Here are more details about this project which has been named as project Nilgiri.
- Under this initiative, free Wi-Fi services will be provided to passengers in 400 railway stations across the country using Google’s fiber technologu
- People will be able to access high speed internet for the first 30 minutes completely free of cost
- A special One Time Password has been generated for this purpose and users will be able to access free internet by using it
- The connection of the users will still be active after 30 minutes of internet usage. However, after 30 minutes, the speed will drop and become slow
- Under Fiber technology, the company provides internet services up to a speed of 1 Gigabits per second
- This type of initiative was launched in 2010 and the service is available only in the United States of America
- Using satellite communication technology, the Indian Railways is also providing Wi-Fi connectivity in moving trains for a few selected routes – as a pilot project
The project Nilgiri is being carried out in phases. As per Sunder Pichai, the CEO of Google, people have used about 15 times more data than they usually do and this explains the reason why Google chose to collaborate with the Indian Railways. Reliable power supply and chance to reach huge and wider population being the other reasons. Nevertheless, it’s a great step towards the propagation of Digital India!