Google unveiled on this Friday itself that almost 2 million Indians are using the high-speed Wi-Fi services at 23 railway stations across the country that the technology giant provided as part of its project.
While speaking during the Google-owned multinational conglomerate Alphabet’s 2016 second quarter earnings call, CEO Sunder Pichai said that Google has teamed up with Indian Railways & RailTel for bringing the high-speed wireless access to millions of people who use railway stations.
“There are already two million people logging in every month. They are using as much as 15 times the data that they would otherwise use in a full day on their cellular networks.” Pichai said.
RailTel, which is owned by Indian Railways, works on providing broadband and virtual private network (VPN) services.
Last month itself the search giant celebrated the success of its project with RailTel that aims at providing the high speed Wi-Fi at railway stations across India. They did it on the occasion of the inaugural World Wi-Fi Day by the Wireless Broadband Alliance, which is formed for providing a platform to help bridge the digital divide.
The network was initially rolled out by the company at four of India’s largest stations — Sealdah, Lucknow Junction, Lucknow City and Gorakhpur Junction.
The company also unveiled that while they are only at approximately 20% the launch schedule for this year, they experienced a phenomenal response.
“We saw 100,000 users connect to the network within a week of launch at Mumbai Central and as we started rolling out the network at more stations, we saw exponential jump in the consumption of the network,” the company wrote in a blog post.
“Users in tier 2 cities latched onto the network with more enthusiasm and we saw much higher consumption of data in tier 2 cities, where access to high-speed broadband is more challenging,” Google added.
Source: India Today
