The search engine giant Google has really made a difference in the lives of Indians. And the number is not small; they have affected the lives of nearly 2 million Indian internet users. It is amusing to know that nearly two million Indians are using high Wi-Fi services at 23 railway stations all across the country that Google has provided as a part of its project. But, it is just a trailer.
The experiment was very successful and now the company plans to introduce free WiFi portals on a total of 100 Indian Railway Stations.
During Alphabet’s 2016 second quarter earnings investor call, Indian-origin CEO Sundar Pichai stated that Google has initiated a project with Indian Railways and RailTel to introduce the high-speed wireless access to the millions of passengers who use Railway Stations in India. Alphabet is the Google-owned multinational conglomerate.
“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.” Mr. Pichai said.
As owned by the Indian Railways, RailTel is focused on providing broadband and Virtual Private Network (VPN) services. In the month of June, on the occasion of the inaugural World Wi-Fi Day by the Wireless Broadband Alliance which aims to provide a complete platform so that a bridge can be built for the digital divide, Google had celebrated this project’s success with Railtel to provide high-speed Wi-Fi at railway stations across India. Initially, as an experiment, the company rolled out the free WiFi service at the India’s four largest stations – Sealdah, Lucknow Junction, Lucknow City and Gorakhpur Junction.
As per the company’s professionals, this roll out strength is only around 20 percent out of the total which is being scheduled for this year, but the response has been phenomenal.
The Company’s Blog post said, “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 an exponential jump in the consumption of the network”.
“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.
The data specifies that the largest cellular company, Bharti Airtel has 90.53 million active Internet subscribers while Vodafone, Idea Cellular, and Reliance had 67.55 million, 44.03 million and 39 million users, respectively.
Google and all its officials are quite satisfied with these results. “Our investment in mobile underlines everything we do… (from) search and YouTube to Android and advertising. Mobile is the engine that drives everything” said CEO Sundar Pichai. He added that through Google’s “deep investments in machine learning and artificial intelligence, the company is building the engine that drives its future”.
