High-speed Wi-Fi rolls into 100th railway station in India

[amjd]

I have personally used this. The speeds are pretty good, and it's easy to start using it.

  1. Enter your mobile number to receive an OTP
  2. Type the OTP.
  3. Connection is established.

I don't understand why some people are being so negative about this. It's a good quality service being offered free of charge. I can imagine a number of scenarios where it can be a life saver to have dependable internet at a railway station.

[falloutx]

Indian apps/software are so intrusive.

> 1. Enter your mobile number to receive an OTP.

Why do I need to provide my Identity to a fucking railway station anyway. There are probably better ways to do this rather than this insulting way.

Probably everyone needs to start carrying a junk phone number.

[piyush_soni]

The most important being to access mobile cab services. I used this too.

[psibi]

I used the ones in Chennai and it was pretty good. When the Vardha cyclone hit Chennai, most of the local ISPs went down (the internet in my area is still down). The internet at the railways was working good.

[Abishek_Muthian]

Google's head of access programs in India - Azar says, that each station has "1Gbps plus backhaul through fiber". Any googler here? It would be interesting to know how google employed VSAT & SDN technologies to connect 100 different railway stations in 12 months.

[bitwiseand]

Google works with a subsidiary of the Railways called RailTel. A lot of the infrastructure / backbone was supplied by RailTel which allowed the project to move fast.

[hueving]

How would vsat or SDN be required for such basic infrastructure? Consumers can get 1gbps to their house.

[babyrainbow]

But rails just in front of you are still littered with shit. And you won't be able to hear train announcement because it is mixed up in the Ads blasted from the same speakers perpetually. And if you have to contact enquiry, you will have to cross any number of platforms (often crossing the pile of shit mentioned earlier) to the very first platform....

But hey, let us give people WiFi so that they don't notice the shit they are surrounded with...

[photonwins]

The new railway minister has been working relentlessly on improving the situation, we are already seeing a huge improvement. Trains are being run on time, it is a huge problem that doesn't go away overnight. I am willing to give the current government more time if they can stay the current course they are on.

Also, it would be nicer if you keep yourself updated on the latest development on the subject you are going to comment on. RM's twitter handle is a good place to start.

https://twitter.com/sureshpprabhu

[rv11]

most of the inquiry can be done online. so you can use your wifi and avoid going to platform 1.

[alphakappa]

Instead of a static image with a few stations on it, I would have expected Google to provide a map of all the 100 stations they are talking about. It's silly that the most important bit of info has been left out.

[helloworld]

It's odd, too, that the map's shades-of-blue color scheme makes the land look like water:

https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima...

That map would be easier to parse, I think, if the water areas were the dark-blue shade, and the land areas were the light blue. (I guess I just realized that I have an implicit visual grammar of maps. I'm not sure whether it's universal.)

[Animats]

Why is Google taking credit for this? RailWire, a unit of India's Ministry of Railways, is doing the job. The rollout was last year.[1]

Railroads usually have lots of wire along their right of way. Adding bandwith is cheap. That's how Sprint (originally Southern Pacific Communications) got started. Railroad stations are good places to hook into fiber.

[1] http://railwire.co.in/#.

[sumedh]

> Why is Google taking credit for this?

Probably because they are paying for it.

[lrk_sirius]

It doesn't really work in the Lucknow railway station. Although there are ads all over the place that say "High Speed Wi-Fi available here", sometimes your device won't even discover the "Railwire" SSID.

A high-speed Wi-Fi service also seems a bit stupid given the fact that no ISP in Lucknow provides an unlimited 50+ Mbps broadband connection. What do they expect us to do? Take our laptops and sit at the station which is littered with rats, monkeys, their shit, and trash?

You can get an unlimited <50Mbps connection but that'll cost you approximately $500 - $1000 a month. For other "home users" there are shitty plans that give you 30GB-200GB of data with 2Mbps - 16Mbps for approximately $30 a month.

[shripadk]

Are you sure it is 500$ - 1000$ a month or 500Rs - 1000Rs a month? Which part of India are you talking about?

I live in Hyderabad and I get 100mbps unlimited for just 2000Rs per month (which is approximately 30$ per month). You can check the tariff page for proof: http://www.actcorp.in/personal/fibernet/plans

I think you were ripped off by a local ISP who cheated you with really high rates just because you are a foreigner.

[aptwebapps]

A high-speed Wi-Fi service also seems a bit stupid given the fact that no ISP in Lucknow provides an unlimited 50+ Mbps broadband connection. What do they expect us to do? Take our laptops and sit at the station which is littered with rats, monkeys, their shit, and trash?

I don't understand why the lack of a good ISP in Lucknow means someone should not try provide high-speed Wi-Fi at the train station. Are you saying it's an inefficient allocation of resources?

[dm3730]

Sounds like there's room for a startup to provide a satisfactory internet service in your city.

Maybe also room for a startup that could keep your train station free of rats, monkeys and feces and trash.

[ksec]

Has anyone around the world has experience with a decent public WiFi Services? Whether they are from government, telecoms provider or third party.

WiFi- being a best effort services, doesn't come anywhere close to LTE in UX. You get much better latency when you are collected, but you can only connect from time to time, and even if you are connected, it doesn't mean it will load. The Login system are better with "some" advancement on AutoLogin with Cert. By make worse if the WiFi doesn't work well your phone are constantly trying to load without getting any data, draining battery.

[sethhochberg]

LinkNYC is still rolling out, but, in my experience so far in Manhattan has been pretty great. They have strong backhaul, good radios in the devices themselves, and enough of them to make a mostly-continuous network on heavily traveled avenues.

https://www.link.nyc/

TransitWireless, the in-subway wifi in many train stations here, is comparatively much worse - but tbey also provide underground cellular service, which is almost always usable.

[notatoad]

Shaw wifi in Canada is actually pretty good, considering the general incompetence of our telecoms. Just about every business in the Calgary area that's a Shaw internet customer offers it, it's reasonably fast, sign-in is simple, and you stay signed in for a reasonably long time without jumping through hoops. The only catch is you have to be a Shaw home internet customer to access it, you can't just get standalone wifi access.

[mads]

Starbucks WiFi in China is usually better than our office WiFi (in China).

[benbristow]

I find ScotRail to have pretty decent WiFi in the stations that they have it installed. Seem to be using Level3 as their ISP.

[GordonS]

Ever tried it on any of their trains when moving? Absolutely unusable 99% of the time, so I wouldn't bother paying extra for 1st class thinking you can get work done on a long journey :(

[anticodon]

As a tourist who visited India 4 times for several months (6 month tourist visa) I can't believe this. I traveled all India (from Delhi to Kanyakumari and back). There's no good internet. You're very lucky if you have some Internet. High-speed? Forget about it.

[vinay427]

I'm not sure what you don't believe. Perhaps you should try it and report back with some actual evidence instead of ignoring that change is possible.

[piyush_soni]

Yes, lack of good internet is a problem here. But this is a new service from Google (collaborating with Indian Railways), which might be a bit better. Also, if you had taken a 4G sim card (in the last couple of years) in most cities you get up to 4G speeds in your phone.

[fareesh]

I remember reading that most of the traffic is porn. Not sure if it's having the desired kind of impact.

[late2part]

You're in college in a high tech city. Your life is pretty good.

[sharpercoder]

Please do not do anything other then 100% black text on 100% white background or reverse. Any style-arguments you have are defeated by sheer readability and usability.

[witty_username]

Ironically, this comment has grey on grey text due to heavy downvoting.