To make millions of train travellers connected online, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has announced plans to bring high-speed public Wi-Fi in 400 train stations across India. He notes that there’s still over a billion of people in his native country that aren’t connected.
We’d
like to help get these next billion Indians online—so they can access the entire
web, and all of its information and opportunity. And not just with any old
connection—with fast broadband so they can experience the best of the web.
That’s why, today, on the occasion of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s
visit to our U.S. headquarters, and in line with his Digital India initiative,
we announced a new project to provide high-speed public Wi-Fi in 400 train
stations across India.
Here’s a map of the first 100 train stations
that will get Wi-Fi by the end of 2016:
Google will be working with Indian
Railways, which operates one of the world’s largest railway
networks, and RailTel, which provides Internet services via a fiber network along many of these
railway lines.
Pichai explained why just 100 stations will
speed up the process of getting more of India’s residents on the Internet:
Even
with just the first 100 stations online, this project will make Wi-Fi available
for the more than 10 million people who pass through every day. This will rank
it as the largest public Wi-Fi project in India, and among the largest in the
world, by number of potential users. It will also be fast—many times faster
than what most people in India have access to today, allowing travelers to
stream a high definition video while they’re waiting, research their
destination, or download some videos, a book or a new game for the journey
ahead. Best of all, the service will be free to start, with the long-term goal
of making it self-sustainable to allow for expansion to more stations and other
places, with RailTel and more partners, in the future.
"Just like I did years ago, thousands of young
Indians walk through Chennai Central every day, eager to learn, to explore and
to seek opportunity. It's my hope that this Wi-Fi project will make all these
things a little easier," hopes Pichai.
This project should help the next generations of the residents of India get and stay online.
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