Google Is Killing Its Free, High-Speed WiFi Hotspot Program At Railway Stations

Google Station, a program which was launched by the search giant in partnership with the Indian Railways and Railtel back in 2015 to introduce free WiFi to India's crowded railway stations, is coming to an end by the turn of this year.

In a blog post by Caesar Sengupta, VP - Payments and Next Billion Users at Google, the Mountain View giant will now be working with partners to transition existing sites so they can remain useful resources for the community.

“Our commitment to supporting the next billion users remains stronger than ever, from continuing our efforts to make the internet work for more people; building more relevant and helpful apps and services; providing digital skills training for users and businesses and creating platforms that are helpful and empower developers and internet users around the world.”

Active in more than 400 of the busiest railway stations in India, Google Station is being phased out for two primary reasons: mobile data becoming so cheap that free hotspots are not all that needed — in India, the price of mobile data has fallen from INR 269 a GB in 2014 to less than INR 12 by 2018, a decrease of more than 95%. Today, Indian users consume close to 10 GB of data, each month, on an average.

The second reason being Google's failure to make the program financially viable. “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,” Sengupta explained in the blog post.

Through the project's five year presence in the country, Google has also noticed that the challenge of varying technical requirements and infrastructure among its partners across countries has made it difficult for the project to scale up and be sustainable, especially for its partners.

There is a silver lining though. RailTel in a statement to TechCrunch, has mentioned that it plans to continue supporting the 400 WiFi points Google has rolled out in its stations via the Google Station project over the years. RailTel itself has WiFi access points in 5,600 stations, so it sounds like absorbing an additional 400 stations that Google helped in launching, won’t be a big chore.

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