Google and RailTel’s Free high-speed WiFi Service Launched at Mumbai Central Railway Station

Indian Railway’s arm RailTel and search engine giant Google on Friday announced the availability of free high-speed public WiFi service at the Mumbai Central Railway Station. Google had announced its plans to bring high-speed free WiFi service to 400 Indian railway stations back in September when Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the Google headquarters in Mountain View, California.

Google on Friday said that it will expand the free WiFi network to 100 of the busiest railway stations in India by the end of 2016, and the project will eventually cover 400 railway stations across India. The search engine giant said that the service would be next rolled out to Allahabad, Patna, Jaipur, and Ranchi.

To use the high-speed public WiFi service, users will have to first authenticate their credentials. That will happen through an SMS.

Process to Use free Wifi Service

To use the free WiFi service at Mumbai Central Railway Station, you will have to use following method:

• Select RailWire from available WiFi networks in your device.
• Open your browser and enter the URL, railwire.co.in into the browser window.
• Enter the phone number in WiFi login screen and click Receive SMS button.
• SMS with 4-number OTP will be sent. Use the OTP to login.

“Our intent was to fulfill Indian Railway’s vision of providing Railway passengers access to high-speed Internet through our Optical fiber communication network. Affordable smartphones have made it possible for the common men to experience the power of Internet. With our partnership with Google, we are very confident of rolling out a robust, scalable service at Railway stations in the near future,” said R K Bahuguna, Chairman and Managing Director, Railtel.

“We’re delighted to launch India’s first high-speed public WiFi service in partnership with Indian Railways. Bringing affordable Internet access to millions of people is an important part of making the Internet both easily accessible and useful for more than 300 million Indians who are already online, and the nearly one billion more who are not,” said Rajan Anandan, VP and Managing Director, Google India.

“We’ve focused on delivering a network that is at par with the high-speed public WiFi network that is available to users in developed countries. The network is built for wide coverage and high capacity usage unlike a typical WiFi hotspot which offers connectivity in the limited area and poor experience. This network will extend to cover both long distance train station and the local train station in Mumbai Central. The next four stations we’ll bring online will be Allahabad, Patna, Jaipur and Ranchi and others will follow very shortly,” said, Gulzar Azad, head of Access Programs, Google India.

The Railway ministry sources revealed that only the first hour of internet surfing will be free and after that, every user will be charged between Rs.25 to Rs.30 per hour.