Indian Railways and Google has joined forces to create India’s largest network of free WiFi across 400 railway stations, pan India. As per the details obtained, first 30 minutes of this service would enable high speed Internet, after which the speed will drop, but the connection remains active.
This special partnership has been named as ‘Project Nilgiri’; and aims to use Google Fiber technology to provide high speed Internet service.
But the masterstroke which Google has played this time is their partnership with RailTel, to access infrastructure and platform. Indian Railways had announced earlier that they are working on a plan to provide WiFi based Internet across 400 railway stations. But now, the plan looks concrete.
TelecomTalk were the first to report this news, as they shared exclusive screenshots of Project Nilgiri:
This special partnership has been named as ‘Project Nilgiri’; and aims to use Google Fiber technology to provide high speed Internet service.
But the masterstroke which Google has played this time is their partnership with RailTel, to access infrastructure and platform. Indian Railways had announced earlier that they are working on a plan to provide WiFi based Internet across 400 railway stations. But now, the plan looks concrete.
TelecomTalk were the first to report this news, as they shared exclusive screenshots of Project Nilgiri:
An unnamed insider shared, “The Indian Railways has currently undertaken a pilot project in combination with google under the code name of ‘Project Nilgiri’ under which in phase 1 we will be setting up Wi-Fi hotspots at approximately 400 stations across India over a span of 4 months from now.”
RailTel Corporation of India is a public sector unit, having massive access to connectivity and infrastructure. As of now, RailTel’s network passes through 5000 railway stations across India, connecting 63,500 kms of railway track!
RailTel’s optical fiber cable has already been laid across 32,500 kms pan-India; work is in progress for 29,500 kms. As per Wikipedia, RailTel has “state of the art multimedia telecom network using SDH/DWDM-based transmission systems and high end routers for MPLS-IP network.”
And the best part is that, DoT has already allocated 2.7 GHz band to RailTel for launching broadband and other Internet based services.
This seems to be a rather exciting project and since it’s undertaken by Google we inevitably have high hopes. As visible in the screenshot the network will be high speed and be provided free of cost after SMS verification, which in itself is quite a promise. Currently, the download speeds are somewhere in the 7 Mbps range while upload speeds are in 5 Mbps range. In a month or two WLC’s will be set up in Mumbai and Chennai after which latency will fall to 1-2 ms and speeds will increase. So we are totally looking forward to this welcome move.
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