Google Bringing the Internet to more Indians

Google, Sundar Pichai, Google India CEO, Google internet in india, google wi-fi in india, Narendra Modi
California : American multinational technology company Google Inc, specializing in Internet-related services & products and also the world largest search engine Google, has announced the plans to make the Internet accessible to one crore passengers at the 100 busiest railway stations in India by the end of next year.

Sundar Pichai, Indian American CEO of Google, wrote in a post on the official blog citing his own example, how he was traveling from his hometown Chennai to IIT Kharagpur and wondering the scope and potential of railway stations in connecting millions of people everyday.

Pichai posted on posted it after his meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He wrote, "I’m very proud to announce that it’s the train stations of India that are going to help get millions of people online. In the past year, 100 million people in India started using the Internet for the first time."

He further said, "This means there are now more Internet users in India than in every country in the world aside from China. But what's really astounding is the fact that there are still nearly one billion people in India who aren’t online."

Pichai said Google would like to help get these next billion Indians online so they can access the entire web and all of its information and opportunity. And not just with any old connection—with fast broadband so they can experience the best of the web.

He wrote that, "That’s why, today, on the occasion of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to our U.S. headquarters, and in line with his Digital India initiative, we announced a new project to provide high-speed public Wi-Fi in 400 train stations across India."

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, our Access & Energy team plans to bring the first stations online in the coming months. 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.

It will also be fast—many times faster than what most people in India have access to today, allowing travelers to stream a high definition video while they’re waiting, research their destination, or download some videos, a book or a new game for the journey ahead.

Best of all, the service will be free to start, with the long-term goal of making it self-sustainable to allow for expansion to more stations and other places, with RailTel and more partners, in the future.

Google has scheduled to bring the first train station Wi-Fi online in the coming months while promising the quick expansion to cover over 100 of the busiest train stations by the end of 2016.

The railway system in India now has the capacity to carry 21 million people each day and is expected to carry more than 30 million passengers in the next five years.

Earlier, Prime Minister Modi visited Facebook’s headquarters in Menlo Park and answered questions from some of Facebook’s 1.5 billion users at the Townhall.


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