Free WiFi now at 5,500 railway stations

The Railways has provided free WiFi at 5,500 stations across the country, the national transporter's digital arm RailTel said on Friday.

Jharkhand's Mahuamilan station, which comes under the East Central Railway zone, has become the 5,500th station to get the facility, it said.

The Railways began the service of providing free WiFi at its stations from January 2016 from Mumbai Central station, and in a span of 46 months, RailTel has extended the service to 5,500 stations across the country.

"The mission is to provide WiFi at all railway stations (except the halt ones). RailTel has roped in partners like Google, Tata Trust, PGCIL for some parts of the project and also got funding from the Department of Telecom USOF for 200 stations. WiFi is being provided under the brand name Railwire -- the retail broadband service of RailTel," said Puneet Chawla, CMD of RailTel.

In October 2019 a total of 1.5 crore user logins in RailWire Wi-Fi services across all stations consuming 10242TB of data was recorded, Chawla said.