The vision of Digital India of the Prime Minister takes a step further into the future with the participation of Google in the campaign. Narendra Modi met with some top notch CEOs and founders of technological companies during his recent visit to the US. Among the visits was one to the Google search engine main campus at California, where Modi met with Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google. In their meeting, Modi was introduced to the concept of navigational safety and other uses of Street View as well as Google Earth. He was also briefed on four other critical projects that would add value to the government’s ‘Digital India’ campaign.
The meeting turned out to be fruitful with the promise of collaboration of Google with Indian Railways to provide Wi-Fi services at 500 stations by next year. This project has been named Project Nilgiri. Project Nilgiri will use Google Fibre technology, with a promise of high-speed internet services for the first 30 minutes, after which the speeds will drop, although the connection will be stable.
The Plan
This project will be among the largest in the world taking into consideration the number of potential users.
- Initially, free Wi-Fi will be available at 100 stations in India.
- Google has released a map of the stations that will receive high-speed Wi-Fi services.
- Google, along with RailTel, will provide Internet access to 10 million passengers a day.
- Collaboration with RailTel will ensure that Google is not dependent on traditional ISPs, such as Reliance and Airtel to provide WiFi.
- RailTel has already laid fibre network over 32.500 km with coverage of 63,500 Km. Work is in progress for 29,500 km now.
- The first phase of the plan of covering 100 of the busiest train stations in Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, and Bangalore among others is expected to be completed by the end of 2016.
- The expansion to the following 400 stations will be done on the completion of the first 100.
- The Wi-Fi will be free only for the first 30 minutes at high speed after which the speed will drop.
- Passengers can avail unlimited high speed internet access in trains by subscribing to the service.
- Google has promised the best of speeds, fast enough to download a movie in just five minutes.
