With a vision of turning Railway stations into a platform for Digital inclusion, RailTel Corporation of India Limited (“RailTel”), a Mini Ratna (Category – I) Central Public Sector Enterprise under the Ministry of Railways, started providing high speed Wi-Fi service at railway stations. The Wi-Fi service is currently available at 5950+ stations across the country and Wi-Fi at the station premises are accessible to anyone with a smartphone and an active connection (post verification through OTP sent via sms).
RailTel has launched prepaid plans for its Railwire Wi-Fi at 4000+ Railway stations across India. Going forward, a passenger can use 30 min free wi-fi per day at 1 mbps speed at these 4000+ Railway stations. For using the Wi-Fi facility at a higher speed of upto 34mbps, the user needs to choose a plan with higher speed by paying a nominal fee. The plans are as below-
Paid Wi-Fi Plans excluding GST
❖ Rs 10 for 5GB/day
❖ Rs. 15 for 10 GB/day
❖ Rs. 20 for 10 GB/5 days
❖ Rs. 30 for 20 GB/ 5 days
❖ Rs. 40 for 20 GB/ 10 days
❖ Rs. 50 for 30 GB/ 10 days
❖ Rs. 70 for 60 GB/ 30 day
The plans have been designed to offer flexible choice to user as per their need. A number of payment options like net banking, wallet, credit card can be used to purchase plan online.
In Pre covid time more than 2.9 cr people were using the service monthly. Once situation normalizes and footfall at stations becomes regular, a revenue of Rs. 10-15 cr annually is expected from the paid Wi-Fi.
Talking about the plan launch, Shri Puneet Chawla, CMD/ RailTel said, “We did a detailed trial run of Prepaid WiFi at 20 Stations in Uttar Pradesh and based on the response and detailed testing, we are launched this plan at 4000+ more stations across India. We intend to launch the prepaid plans for all the stations with our RailWire Wi-Fi this financial year”.
Indian Railway is the largest public transporter of the nation and railway stations are the melting pots of whole cross section of the society. Passengers use this Wi-Fi facility for streaming High Definition (HD) Videos, download of movies, songs, games and do their office work online. The service has tremendously benefitted the railway passengers and rural population the most.
About RailTel
RailTel a “Mini Ratna (Category-I)” Central Public Sector Enterprise, is one of the largest neutral telecom infrastructure providers in the country (Source: CRISIL Report “Assessment of the telecom and telecom data services industry in India” dated September 2020) owning a Pan-India optic fiber network covering several towns & cities and rural areas of the country. Along with a strong a reliable network of 59098 RKM of Optic fibre (as of 31st Jan 2021), RailTel has two tier III data centers as well. With its Pan India high capacity network, RailTel is working towards creating a knowledge society at various fronts and has been selected for implementation of various mission-mode projects for the Government of India in the telecom field. RailTel offers a bundle of services like, MPLS-VPN, Telepresence, Leased line, Tower Co-location, Data center services etc. RailTel is also working with the Indian Railways to transform railway stations into digital hub by providing public Wi-Fi at railway stations across the country.