Kochi: Google India has announced the roll out of free high-speed public Wi-Fi at nine railway stations across India including Ernakulam Junction (South) in Kerala, in association with RailTel. The other stations are Bhopal, Bhubaneshwar, Kacheguda, Pune, Raipur, Ranchi, Vijayawada and Vishakhapatnam. Google had introduced the free high-speed Wi-Fi at Mumbai Central earlier in January this year.

According to a note posted by Gulzar Azad, Head of Access Project, Google India on Google India Blog, “While you wait for your train, you can now look forward to free high-speed Wi-Fi to hopefully make that wait a bit more enjoyable and productive. We hope that people passing through these first 10 stations will enjoy being able to easily stream (or offline) an HD video, research their destination, or download a book or a new game for their journey ahead.”

“It’s still early days, but we’re really happy about this progress towards making high-speed Wi-Fi available to more than 10 million Indians every day. In the months ahead, we’ll continue to work in close partnership with Indian Railways and RailTel, to reach 90 more stations this year, and eventually 400 spanning the whole of India”, he added.

So how does all of this work?

Well, if you’re in one of these stations, you’ll know that high-speed Wi-Fi is available if you see the ‘RailWire Wi-Fi’ network in your Wi-Fi settings. If you see it, select it and follow the simple steps below to gain access on your phone and up to two additional devices, like a laptop or tablet – you’ll just need an Indian mobile number to get an access code for each device:

The Wi-Fi will be entirely free to start, so you can stream and download to your heart’s content. While there will always be some level of free Wi-Fi available, the long-term goal will be making this self-sustainable to allow for expansion to more stations and places, with RailTel and other partners, in the future. Also, to make sure that a few people spending all day in the station downloading lots of big files don’t slow down the network for everyone, users might notice a drop in speed after their first hour on the network. Most people should still be able to do the things they’ll want to do online.

Kerala IT News