Meet Shrinath, who started a life-changing journey with the help of a Wi-Fi-enabled railway station in India.
For almost two centuries, train stations have launched billions of life-changing journeys in India. But now, those journeys may not even require boarding a train. Since 2015, we have been working with our partners, Indian Railways and RailTel, to bring free Wi-Fi to railway stations in India. This is also in an effort to empower people to take new online journeys.
Shrinath is a porter at Ernakulam Junction station in Cochin, the busiest railway station in South India. His big dream was to become a civil servant in his home state of Kerala. During his tea breaks, he would use the high-speed, free Wi-Fi at the railway station to prepare for the Kerala Public Service entrance examinations. We’re happy to report that Shrinath passed them with flying colours.
Congratulations to Shrinath who scored 82% for the Kerala Civil Service examination!
Sometimes, the journeys we take are for the people we love. Helen is an auto rickshaw driver who spends long hours every day ferrying passengers through traffic jams and bad weather in Kollam, Kerala.
She works hard for an additional income so she can give her son the best possible education. Often, it’s not money that she needs, but rather access to knowledge. While waiting for passengers at the Kollam train station, she never fails to whip out her mobile phone and use the free Wi-Fi there to download educational materials for him.
The free Wi-Fi at railway stations comes from a journey which Indian Railways, RailTel and us (Google) embarked on two and a half years ago. In 2015, our CEO Sundar Pichai and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced a project to provide high-speed and free public Wi-Fi in 400 train stations across India.
Mumbai Central, the first free Wi-Fi enabled railway station, went live on January 2016. We later rolled out Google Station, a global public Wi-Fi programme, based on the model that we developed in India.
Today, we’re proud to announce that Dibrugarh railway station in Assam state — northeast India — is the 400th train station in India to be powered by public Wi-Fi.
There are now over 8 million people getting online access with Google Station every month.
On average, people consume 350MB of data per session. This is roughly the size of a half hour television episode. In fact, over half of the people using Google Station engage in multiple online sessions a day — some are watching videos and some are chatting with friends. Similar to Shrinath and Helen, they are all actively seeking Wi-Fi connection to get things done during their day.
Although we have hit the target of 400 train stations, our journey remains unfinished.
India has the second largest population of Internet users in the world.
However, there are still almost a billion Indians who aren’t online. There are millions of other life-changing journeys that still haven’t been taken.
We realise that not everyone in India lives or works near a train station. So we’re moving beyond train stations and into the rest of the cities. Google Station is now also available in 150 locations in Pune, Maharashtra. More Smart Cities will be coming soon.
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Our journey in India has shown us the tremendous potential of public Wi-Fi programmes in creating opportunities. We believe that the benefits of getting people online can and must be replicated beyond borders.
We’ve launched Google Station in Indonesia and Mexico and will take it to even more countries soon. As we take Google Station global, we remain committed to making the Internet accessible and useful for everyone in India.
This article first appeared on Google Blog.
Lava is an authorised Cloud Partner of Google and is a reseller of G Suite (previously known as Google Apps, Google Maps for Work, and Google Cloud Platform) in Malaysia. With more than a decade of experience in the industry, we’re proud to say we’re one of the leading cloud consultants and service providers in the Asia Pacific region.