Google Planning to End Free Wi-Fi at Railway Stations? Report

Google on Monday confirmed that its free Wi-Fi service across railway stations in India will be discontinued in the coming months. It further mentioned that it has decided to wind down the project called ‘Station in India’ globally as well, now that online services have become more easier and cheaper in the past five years. Besides India, these stations were made available in Nigeria, Thailand, Philippines, Mexico, Indonesia, Brazil and South Africa.

Google Station kicked off at the Mumbai Central station in 2016 in collaboration RailTel and the Indian Railways. The same was announced on September 27, 2015, by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

Though a lot were attracted to the idea, it didn’t pan as well as Google had expected. The idea was that Google will partner with those willing to offer these services and in turn, get reimbursed by them. However, with data becoming cheaper and cheaper, looks like the same didn’t materialise.

“The challenge of varying technical requirements and infrastructure among our partners across countries has also made it difficult for Station to scale and be sustainable, especially for our partners.”

Caesar Sengupta, VP - Payments and Next Billion Users, Google was quoted as saying.

“We are working with our partners to transition existing sites so they can remain useful resources for the community,” he further added on stations that are already issuing the service.

“We see greater need and bigger opportunities in making building products and features tailored to work better for the next billion user markets,” he further said.

It has be recalled that Facebook too tried something similar – free Express Internet project, however, the results were same as that of the Google’s Free Wi-Fi password.