Free wifi at stations a hit!

This news headline screamed, “Google’s free wifi at Indian railway stations is better than most of the country’s paid services”

Surely it was an attention seeker because this news does make up sit and take notice, wondering “how come?” Google had announced in Sept 2015 that it will be installing hi-speed wif at 400 train stations in India, supporting the Digital India move. The project went live in January  with Mumbai Central station becoming the first. Now it is available in 19 stations and Google says it is being used by some 1.5 million Indians. By Dec’16, it hopes to have covered 100 stations.

Google has said that the free internet is much faster than the 3G internet that is most widely used in India. On average, users of the free railway-station internet—despite being in transit, and being limited to one hour of use per person per day—utilize 15 times more data than they would consume on 3G in a day. Free public WiFi has a time limit, not a download limit. People using the service said that apps get downloaded with seconds much better than what most of us get at home.

So now you where you need to head if need a big file or movie to download. Maybe this wifi will bring in coffee shop culture in our Railway stations where for the sake of this hi-speed wifi people would actually hangout at a station.