Indian Railways in mission mode for one of the world’s largest free public WiFi networks! Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman in her Union Budget 2020 speech highlighted that for the benefit of passengers & people, free and fast WiFi facility is being provided at thousands of railway stations across the Indian Railways network. In her second Union Budget, the Finance Minister said that the Indian Railways has commissioned WiFi facilities at as many as 550 railway stations within 100 days of the Modi government coming to power for the second time.

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In December last year, Mahua Milan Railway station under the East Central Railways zone had earned the distinction of becoming the 5,500th station on the Indian Railways network to get free high-speed public WiFi facility. The railway station in Jharkhand was connected to high-speed WiFi by RailTel, which was entrusted with the task of transforming railway stations across India into digital inclusion hubs.

RailTel, a Miniratna PSU under Ministry of Railways, began its project of installing free high-speed WiFi at railways stations from Mumbai Central station in January 2016, and in only 46 months it achieved the target of connecting 5,500 stations with free high-speed WiFi.

As per Puneet Chawla, Chairman and Managing Director of RailTel, the free high-speed Internet facility is very popular among passengers. He said the number of users and data consumption has been growing steadily. The total number of users who logged-in to the RailWire WiFii stood at 1.5 crore in October 2019 and 10242 TB of data was consumed.

Here’s how one can access high-speed WiFi facilities at Indian Railways’ stations for free:

To avail the free and fast high-speed WiFi facilities at Indian Railways’ stations, passengers and people should have a smartphone. They have to turn on their smartphone’s WiFi mode and select RailWire WiFi network. This will open the RailWire homepage screen on their smartphone. Into the fields on the homepage, they have to input their mobile phone number. On doing this, they will receive a One-time Password (OTP) in the form of an SMS. Once they submit the OTP they will be able to access the high-speed Internet services for free.