Sundar Pichai announces initiative.
By Raif Karerat
Google announced Monday that it will begin providing high-speed public Wi-Fi throughout 400 train stations across India.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced the new program in a blog post as Prime Minister Narendra Modi visits Google’s Mountain View headquarters in order to bolster support for his Digital India initiative.
Working with Indian Railways, which operates one of the world’s largest railway networks, and RailTel, which provides Internet services as RailWire via its extensive fiber network along many of these railway lines, Google’s Access & Energy team “plans to bring the first stations online in the coming months,” according to Pichai.
The network will expand quickly to cover 100 of the busiest stations in India before the end of 2016, with the remaining stations following in quick succession.
“Even with just the first 100 stations online, this project will make Wi-Fi available for the more than 10 million people who pass through every day. This will rank it as the largest public Wi-Fi project in India, and among the largest in the world, by number of potential users,” wrote Pichai.
He also promised the new system would offer considerably faster speeds than what most people have access to today.
India is one of the countries where Google is rolling out Android One, which provides low-cost Android phones to people in developing countries, reported PC Magazine.
“To help address the challenges of limited bandwidth, we recently launched a feature that makes mobile webpages load faster and with less data, and we’ve made YouTube available offline with offline Maps coming soon,” Pichai said today.
To help make web content more useful for Indians, many of whom don’t speak English, Google launched the Indian Language Internet Alliance last year to foster more local language content, and have built greater local language support into Google products — including Hindi Voice Search, an improved Hindi keyboard and support for seven Indian languages with the latest versions of Android, reported the Economic Times.
“And finally, to help all Indians reap the benefits of connectivity, we’ve been ramping up efforts to help women, who make up just a third of Internet users in India today, get the most from the web,” Pichai concluded.