Google to provide wireless Internet to 100 key Indian railway stations by 2016 end
...and extend it to 300 more stations subsequently.
As reported earlier this month, the plan for Google to deliver WiFi to Indian railway stations looks to be on solid footing. This news was reiterated when Google’s head honcho Sundar Pichai had a high-level meeting recently with Prime Minister Narendra Modi during his visit to their headquarters at Mountain View, California.
The announcement states that a total of 400 stations will experience the benefits of this initiative. Google’s Access & Energy team will be working with the Indian Railways and RailTel to bring WiFi-based Internet connectivity to 100 of India’s busiest railway stations--including those in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore--by the end of next year.
In what will be a boon to the 10 million odd passengers who travel the Indian Railways, this service, in Sundar Pichai’s own words, is slated to be many times faster than what most people in India have access to today.
This project makes it the most high-scale public Internet infrastructure project in the world, and is bound to boost local economies and commercial establishments in and around railways stations. The details of how this internet service is going to be provided haven’t been revealed, but if it is anything like Google’s other Internet infrastructure projects, it is bound to be quite effective indeed.