RailTel’s free Railwire Wi-Fi is now available in 9 more train stations in India after having been launched earlier this year at the Mumbai Central station in the western city of Mumbai, Maharashtra. Railwire is an initiative of the Indian Railways in association with Google that was announced back in September last year with the promise of free, high-speed Wi-Fi access at over 400 train stations across India. The tech giant had said back then that it was working with the Indian Railways and RailTel to launch its services in the country with ambitious plans of connecting more than 10 million passengers to the internet daily. The American tech giant also said that it will wire 100 out of the proposed 400 stations by the end of this year itself.
Coming to the news at hand, the nine train stations that are now hooked up to the internet with free public Wi-Fi are Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Ernakulam Junction, Kacheguda, Pune, Raipur, Ranchi, Vijayawada and Vishakhapatnam. While the Wi-Fi that’s available at Mumbai Central now serves over 100,000 travelers each week, the availability of free Wi-Fi at the nine new locations will reportedly offer internet access to over 1.5 million commuters on a daily basis. According to Mr. Gulzar Azad, Head of Access Project, Google India, the company is “scaling up” its efforts to roll out the network eventually to stations in some of the smaller towns across the country in addition to the comparatively larger ones that are being covered during the first phase. Mr. Azad also reminded the media that the Railwire free Wi-Fi project “will be the largest publicly accessible high speed Wi-Fi network in the country” and expressed hope that “this project will set new benchmarks in delivering a reliable and consistent network connectivity”.
Logging on to the Wi-Fi network will be a fairly simple process if everything works the way they should. Users wanting to give it a go need to first connect to Railwaire’s network from the ‘Wi-Fi settings’ options on their devices. Once that’s done, users will be able to navigate to Railwaire’s website (railwire.co.in). Users will then need to enter their phone number on the login screen, following which, they should receive a One Time Password (OTP) that can then be used to access the full internet.