Bhubaneswar: Passengers waiting for their trains at the Bhubaneswar raliway station will now have plenty to do if they have a smartphone or laptop. With free, high speed WI-FI service being available at the station from today, they can now surf the net, do social media or stream high definition videos to away time while waiting for their respective trains.
Railway minister Suresh Prabhu, who is on a two-day Odisha visit, will launch the free service at the station today.
Under the Digital India initiative, Railways is committed to provide better internet facilities to the passengers at 100 busiest stations in the country by the end of this year. Eventually, the service will be rolled out at 400 stations across the country covering all major rail premises.
Besides Bhubaneswar, trials are going on at about 10 more stations including Jaipur, Patna, Ranchi, Ernakulum, Allahabad, Lucknow and Guwahati for the luanch of Wi-Fi services shortly.
Railtel, a PSU of the Railways, is providing free Wi-Fi service at stations in collaboration with Google. Railtel owns a pan-India optic fiber network exclusively on railway tracks. It has laid out over 45,000 kms of optic fibre network across the country, which Google will utilise for its Wi-Fi service.
The network is built for wide coverage and high capacity usage unlike a typical Wi-Fi hotspot which offers connectivity in a limited area.
As per the plan, Railtel will be the ISP, while Google will provide the Wireless Area Networks (WAN) and will set-up the points of access at platforms.