How Google is turning stations into cyber hubs
BENGALURU: Railway stations are slowly becoming the new cyber hubs.
With the internet giant teaming up with RailTel, the telecom arm of Indian Railways, to provide free wi-fi at 20 stations across the country, mostly in small cities, more and more people are finding it convenient to walk into the nearest station and log on to the Net.
Google rolled out its first public wi-fi hotspot at Mumbai Central in January, and since then, over 1.5 million people have logged on to the free network at different stations, the company said. In fact, Bhubaneshwar overtook Mumbai in data consumption.
According to Google, people in such cases access up to 15 times more data than they usually do on personal data packs.
The service is currently available in rail stations in Pune, Ranchi, Jaipur, Allahabad, Guwahati, Bhopal, Ujjain, Vishakhapatnam, Vijaywada, Ernakulam, Raipur, Patna, Kacheguda, Lucknow, Gorakhpur, Puri and Sealdah. The company is looking to take it to 400 stations by next year.
“I have started selling my designs on various websites... The wi-fi at the station works at high speeds, I do not get this much speed even on my 3G dongle,” said K Naga, a fashion designing student from Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh.
Though Google did not disclose the internet speed available at the stations, a company executive put it close to around 2 mbps (mega bits per second) — fast enough to browse Netflix.
For the company, the opportunity is huge.
Estimates suggest only one in four (or 25%) of 1.3 billion Indians have access to the Net. The penetration is over 80% in the US and over 50% in other BRICS countries. The lack of connectivity, also referred to as the digital divide, is considered a problem as well as an opportunity.
But more than the digital divide, it is the experience divide that the company is trying to address. “With cheaper data plans and falling prices of devices, the digital divide is fast diminishing. What is growing exponentially is the experience divide,” said Gulzar Azad, head , access projects at Google India.
Experience divide happens when people with internet access cannot view contents such as videos, due to lack of broadband access. This means 40% of the 350 million people accessing the net in India have a limited access, thanks to slow speed, according to Google.
Since the wi-fi network is also accessible outside the station, taxi drivers and other service providers in the vicinity are also able to use the internet.