Long live this friendship! 🙂
Oh wait, the collaboration, we mean!
Ever since its tie-up with RailTel, Google has already rolled out free Wi-Fi service at many railway stations. Starting with Mumbai Central, followed by Bhubaneswar Station, the free public Wi-Fi is now live at 52 railway stations in the country.
You can connect to the Wi-Fi for free at stations like Guwahati, Coimbatore, New Delhi Railway Station, Bhopal, Patna Junction, Jhansi, Ernakulam Junction, and many others.
What’s more interesting is the fact that Google has initiated a hotspot program named Google Station, under which universities, malls, and other institutions can pay and sign up with Google to kickstart the use of public Wi-Fi on their mobiles/laptops.
Google has plans to utilise the 45,000 km laid out pan-India optic fibre network for its Wi-Fi service.
In his visit to India in January this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai shared that its Wi-Fi project aimed at providing free Wi-Fi service at 100 busiest stations by the end of 2016.
As per Caesar Sengupta, Vice President of “Next Billion Users“ at Google, “There are more than 3.5 million users on rail WiFi every month. Of these 15,000 every day are first-time users of the internet”.
He further added, “As for ‘Station’, it is currently open for application for ‘large venues and organizations, network operators, fibre providers, system integrators and infrastructure companies’ who can sign up on the Google Station website”.
It is believed that this project will definitely be the largest publicly accessible high-speed Wi-Fi network in India, and the service will be made available to 400 railway stations across the country.
Railway Minister Suresh Prabhu has announced that similar service will be made available at all 100 A1 and A railway stations this year itself. Even Puri and Cuttack Railway Station will be brought under the project and initiatives would be taken to make sure Puri Station has free Wi-Fi service.
And here’s how you can connect to Free Wi-Fi:
Step 1: All you have to do is to select the Railwire network in your device’s Wi-Fi settings.
Step 2: Once selected the same, open your browser and enter “railwire.co.in” (URL of the railways) into the window.
Step 3: You will then be directed to the login screen where you can enter your phone number and click on “receive SMS”.
Step 4: A 4-digit OTP code will be sent to you in SMS. Just fill up the code in the Wi-Fi login and click “done”.
Step 5: You can then see a checkmark that’ll let you know that you are connected to fast, free Wi-Fi.
All set to connect to the free Wi-Fi?
Well, if you still want to simplify your experience, go to the main menu of the ixigo trains app and click on “Enable Wi-Fi”.
And you are sorted! 😀
