Since 2015, Google has been working with federally-owned and operated entities, the Indian Railways and RailTel, a pan-India optic fiber network running along railway tracks in rural and urban regions covering 70% of India’s population, to bring public Wi-Fi to India’s train stations. The first Wi-Fi-enabled railway station, Mumbai Central, went live on January 2016.
Having reached its target of 400 Wi-Fi enabled stations in Phase 1 of the project, Google plans to provide Wi-Fi on board moving trains across India in Phase 2. “India has the second largest population of Internet users in the world, but there are still almost a billion Indians who aren’t online. We realize that not everyone in India lives or works near a train station, so we’re moving beyond train stations and into the rest of the cities,” says a blog post by Google.
Google rolled out a global public Wi-Fi program called Google Station based on the model that they developed in India. It has been launched in Indonesia and Mexico and is expected to extend to other countries.
