Mumbai Central first railway station to get Wi-Fi facility by mid-October

NEW DELHI: Mumbai Central will be the first railway station in the country to get Google’s high-speed public Wi-Fi connectivity, said a top executive at state-run RailTel Corporation, which has partnered with the internet major to install Wi-Fi hotspots at 400 stations in India. Google will begin the wor k at Mumbai Central next month and the service is expected to be ready for public use by mid-October, A Seshagiri Rao, director-network planning & marketing at RailTel, told ET.

The Wi-Fi will be free for the first 30 minutes over a 24-hour period. It will be a high-speed network capable of delivering HD video streaming services and passengers will be able to download a movie in four minutes. Rao said customers will have to pay for the service if they use it beyond 30 minutes. RailTel and Google are working on the monetisation model.

"The focus is to provide seamless internet connection. Once we have seamless and uniform service, a revenue model can evolve," Rao said. The Wi-Fi project was announced by Google’s India-born CEO Sundar Pichai on Sunday after his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The initial target is to make internet accessible to one crore passengers at 100 busiest railway stations in India by mid-2016, and then expand it to 300 other stations, Rao said.




He added that the company is providing its passive infrastructure that comprises fibre connected with its MPLS network to Google, which will provide Wi-Fi access through their radio access points at all the platforms. Google had confirmed the tieup with RailTel in a blog on Sunday. "We have got fibre drop at all the railways station along with electronics.

Being a pan-India operator, RailTel will offer ready availability of passive infrastructure at all the railway station," Rao said, adding that Google has got the technology and experience, and has rolled out many Wi-FI hotspots in the US. RailTel operates under the railways ministry. Railtel has built over 45,000 km of optic fibre network across the railways network in India, connecting over 4,500 cities and towns and over 5,000 railway stations in the country. It is looking to monetise its fibre network through partnerships with telecom operators.

"It’s a neutral infrastructure, and can be used by any telecom service operator for Wi-Fi data offload," Rao said. RailTel will also use the railways Wi-Fi project with Google to publicise its own retail broadband brand — RailWire — which is providing broadband through its collaboration with local cable operators to reach domestic home segment in the country. "We want to use the Wi-Fi service as a brand building tool at railways stations so that it helps us in spreading the word about the RailWire," Rao said.