Free WiFi service to continue at railway stations without Google support: RailTel

Just a day after Google announced that it has decided to shut down its 'Station' programme globally, including India, by the end 2020, RailTel on Tuesday (February 18) announced that it will continue to provide free WiFi at over 5,600 railway stations across the country. It is to be noted that US-based tech giant Google has been offering free Wi-Fi services to over 400 railway stations in India since 2015.

As per the deal reached between RailTel and Google, the latter was RailTel's technology partner for 415 stations of A1, A and C category only. "In this partnership Google provided the RAN and technology support and RailTel provided the physical infrastructure and internet bandwidth (ISP). But going forward, apart from these 415 stations, we have also provided free wi-fi in 5190 B, C, D stations as well," RailTel said in a statement.

"We have roped in a number of partners along the journey and currently RailTel is providing free WiFi at 5600 stations across the country. We entered into a five-year contract with Google for supporting us with setting up WiFi at 415 stations only and the contract is going to expire soon," added the statement.

RailTel confirmed that it will continue to provide free WiFi at over 5,600 railway stations across India including the 415 stations which were getting free WiFi under Google's 'Station' programme. 

On Monday (February 17), Google had said that it it will wind down its 'Google Station' programme globally because going online has now become much easier and cheaper. Caesar Gupta, Google Vice President of the Next Billion Users (NBU) announced this through his blog and wrote, ''As we look to the next phase of enabling access, it’s clear that since we started five years ago, getting online has become much simpler and cheaper. Mobile data plans have become more affordable and mobile connectivity is improving globally.''

He also wrote, "India, specifically now has among the cheapest mobile data per GB in the world, with mobile data prices having reduced by 95% in the last 5 years, as per TRAI in 2019. Today, Indian users consume close to 10 GB of data, each month, on average."