Indian Railways is slowly turning stations into digital hubs powered with high-speed internet. With around three crore users’ logging in per month, and over 9,500 Tera Bytes (TB) of aggregated data consumption, the RailWire WiFi service rolled out at 831 railway stations has emerged as one of the world’s largest public WiFi networks.
During the launch of its five-year work report card, Railway Minister Piyush Goyal emphasised that by providing free WiFi, Indian Railways has completed one of the promises made in the party’s manifesto for 2014. “We have plans to make free WiFi available at 4,000 more railway stations across the country,” he added.
The network, provided by miniratna central PSU (Public Sector Undertaking) RailTel under the Ministry of Railways, has set an ambitious target of installing WiFi at 1,000 stations in the next 10 days, said chairman and managing director Puneet Chawla. Talking about providing free WiFi at the Delhi-Ambala and Ambala-Chandigarh sections, he said that there are a total of 35 stations on these routes and passengers will be now be able to log on to high-speed internet for free in these stations.
RailTel has also turned all the railways stations in the Bengaluru-Mysuru section namely Bengaluru City, Kengeri, Bidadi, Ramanagaram, Channapatna, Maddur, Mandya into free WiFi zones. Besides, it has also completed the work of providing free Wi-Fi at nine railway stations on the Jabalpur-Katni section. These stations include Jabalpur, Katni, Deori, Gosalpur, Sihora Road, Dundi, Salimnabad, Niwar and Adhartal.
According to railway officials, internet speeds on the network can go as high as 40 Mbps for the initial 30 minutes of unhindered open access, which is unmatched on any other network, and then comes down to 2Mbps. Plans are also on the anvil to take the WiFi facility to the hinterlands. The Department of Telecommunications (DoT) entrusted RailTel with rolling out WiFi at 200 rural railway stations.