
High-speed Wi-Fi rolls into 100th railway station in India - kungfudoi
https://www.blog.google/topics/google-asia/high-speed-wi-fi-rolls-100th-railway-station-india/
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amjd
I have personally used this. The speeds are pretty good, and it's easy to
start using it.

    
    
      1. Enter your mobile number to receive an OTP
      2. Type the OTP.
      3. Connection is established.
    

I don't understand why some people are being so negative about this. It's a
good quality service being offered free of charge. I can imagine a number of
scenarios where it can be a life saver to have dependable internet at a
railway station.

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falloutx
Indian apps/software are so intrusive.

> 1\. Enter your mobile number to receive an OTP.

Why do I need to provide my Identity to a fucking railway station anyway.
There are probably better ways to do this rather than this insulting way.

Probably everyone needs to start carrying a junk phone number.

~~~
acd10j
Expectations of privacy is asking too much for a free Wi-Fi service. What if a
terrorist or criminals use these wifi to send mail threatening bomb scare.
Even single event like this will put in this whole endeavor in jeopardy.

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psibi
I used the ones in Chennai and it was pretty good. When the Vardha cyclone hit
Chennai, most of the local ISPs went down (the internet in my area is still
down). The internet at the railways was working good.

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Abishek_Muthian
Google's head of access programs in India - Azar says, that each station has
"1Gbps plus backhaul through fiber". Any googler here? It would be interesting
to know how google employed VSAT & SDN technologies to connect 100 different
railway stations in 12 months.

~~~
hueving
How would vsat or SDN be required for such basic infrastructure? Consumers can
get 1gbps to their house.

~~~
wtmt
Which place are you referring to in your statement that consumers can get
1Gbps to their house? The highest consumer grade speeds available in many
cities is around 100Mbps, and that's not available everywhere either. Most
connections come to 2Mbps or even lower (depends on the ISP and the location).

~~~
hueving
Google fiber is the most widely known. All other examples I've seen have been
municipal fiber or small local ISPs.

My point is that 1gbps is trivial and doesn't require special technology. All
the servers I work with now have either 10gb or 40gb cards. 1gb to every
desktop on a campus is common.

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babyrainbow
But rails just in front of you are still littered with shit. And you won't be
able to hear train announcement because it is mixed up in the Ads blasted from
the same speakers perpetually. And if you have to contact enquiry, you will
have to cross any number of platforms (often crossing the pile of shit
mentioned earlier) to the very first platform....

But hey, let us give people WiFi so that they don't notice the shit they are
surrounded with...

~~~
photonwins
The new railway minister has been working relentlessly on improving the
situation, we are already seeing a huge improvement. Trains are being run on
time, it is a huge problem that doesn't go away overnight. I am willing to
give the current government more time if they can stay the current course they
are on.

Also, it would be nicer if you keep yourself updated on the latest development
on the subject you are going to comment on. RM's twitter handle is a good
place to start.

[https://twitter.com/sureshpprabhu](https://twitter.com/sureshpprabhu)

~~~
falloutx
A better way to solve it would be to sell the whole network in pieces and pay
the taxpayer back, but no, they'll never do it cause nothing better than
wasting taxpayer money.

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alphakappa
Instead of a static image with a few stations on it, I would have expected
Google to provide a map of all the 100 stations they are talking about. It's
silly that the most important bit of info has been left out.

~~~
helloworld
It's odd, too, that the map's shades-of-blue color scheme makes the land look
like water:

[https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-
prod/ima...](https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-
prod/images/100_stations.width-792.png)

That map would be easier to parse, I think, if the water areas were the dark-
blue shade, and the land areas were the light blue. (I guess I just realized
that I have an implicit visual grammar of maps. I'm not sure whether it's
universal.)

~~~
notatoad
Somebody at Google must be a fan of Arrested Development. That's a classic
Buster Bluth joke: "oh! The blue on this map must be land!"

~~~
helloworld
I actually just mocked up the inverse, out of curiosity:

[http://imgur.com/a/nPpsL](http://imgur.com/a/nPpsL)

IMHO, at least, it does look better.

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Animats
Why is Google taking credit for this? RailWire, a unit of India's Ministry of
Railways, is doing the job. The rollout was last year.[1]

Railroads usually have lots of wire along their right of way. Adding bandwith
is cheap. That's how Sprint (originally Southern Pacific Communications) got
started. Railroad stations are good places to hook into fiber.

[1] [http://railwire.co.in/#](http://railwire.co.in/#).

~~~
sumedh
> Why is Google taking credit for this?

Probably because they are paying for it.

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lrk_sirius
It doesn't really work in the Lucknow railway station. Although there are ads
all over the place that say "High Speed Wi-Fi available here", sometimes your
device won't even discover the "Railwire" SSID.

A high-speed Wi-Fi service also seems a bit stupid given the fact that no ISP
in Lucknow provides an unlimited 50+ Mbps broadband connection. What do they
expect us to do? Take our laptops and sit at the station which is littered
with rats, monkeys, their shit, and trash?

You can get an unlimited <50Mbps connection but that'll cost you approximately
$500 - $1000 a month. For other "home users" there are shitty plans that give
you 30GB-200GB of data with 2Mbps - 16Mbps for approximately $30 a month.

~~~
dm3730
Sounds like there's room for a startup to provide a satisfactory internet
service in your city.

Maybe also room for a startup that could keep your train station free of rats,
monkeys and feces and trash.

~~~
abverma
>Sounds like there's room for a startup to provide a satisfactory internet
service in your city.

Unfortunately in most cities, Airtel (India's biggest ISP) has a monopoly and
the other local cable providers either cut the cables for other ISPs or either
simply steal them (it was/is a major problem for BSNL, the state-owned ISP).

>Maybe also room for a startup that could keep your train station free of
rats, monkeys and feces and trash.

The trouble here is that the railway contracts usually go to people who throw
in a bribe to the station-master and the higher ups in the Railway Board. And
of course, the contractors don't do their jobs properly because, well, people
gotta earn some money.

~~~
ing33k
Not completely true. There's a process of tenders

[http://www.indianrailways.gov.in/tenders.html](http://www.indianrailways.gov.in/tenders.html)

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ksec
Has anyone around the world has experience with a decent public WiFi Services?
Whether they are from government, telecoms provider or third party.

WiFi- being a best effort services, doesn't come anywhere close to LTE in UX.
You get much better latency when you are collected, but you can only connect
from time to time, and even if you are connected, it doesn't mean it will
load. The Login system are better with "some" advancement on AutoLogin with
Cert. By make worse if the WiFi doesn't work well your phone are constantly
trying to load without getting any data, draining battery.

~~~
sethhochberg
LinkNYC is still rolling out, but, in my experience so far in Manhattan has
been pretty great. They have strong backhaul, good radios in the devices
themselves, and enough of them to make a mostly-continuous network on heavily
traveled avenues.

[https://www.link.nyc/](https://www.link.nyc/)

TransitWireless, the in-subway wifi in many train stations here, is
comparatively much worse - but tbey also provide underground cellular service,
which is almost always usable.

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benbristow
I find ScotRail to have pretty decent WiFi in the stations that they have it
installed. Seem to be using Level3 as their ISP.

~~~
GordonS
Ever tried it on any of their trains when moving? Absolutely unusable 99% of
the time, so I wouldn't bother paying extra for 1st class thinking you can get
work done on a long journey :(

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anticodon
As a tourist who visited India 4 times for several months (6 month tourist
visa) I can't believe this. I traveled all India (from Delhi to Kanyakumari
and back). There's no good internet. You're very lucky if you have some
Internet. High-speed? Forget about it.

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vinay427
I'm not sure what you don't believe. Perhaps you should try it and report back
with some actual evidence instead of ignoring that change is possible.

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andrewshadura
I too haven't seen a good connection anywhere in India. 3G was bearable, but
every single Wi-Fi AP I connected to was so slow it was nearly impossible to
use it.

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fareesh
I remember reading that most of the traffic is porn. Not sure if it's having
the desired kind of impact.

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sharpercoder
Please do not do anything other then 100% black text on 100% white background
or reverse. Any style-arguments you have are defeated by sheer readability and
usability.

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witty_username
Ironically, this comment has grey on grey text due to heavy downvoting.

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ptaipale
Not so ironically, the previous commenter did not choose his text colour;
downvoters did it for him. Creator of the website that this thread discusses
however did, and the contrast is not as good as it could be.

