Railways to jump onto Wi-Fi bandwagon, project to be launched in Shatabdi, Rajdhani trains

Railways to jump onto Wi-Fi bandwagon, project to be launched in Shatabdi, Rajdhani trains
Rajat Guha, TNN

NEW DELHI: You may soon take your office along while travelling in a train. Railways plan to make popular trains like Shatabdi and Rajdhani Wi-Fi enabled. Railways have already started making its stations Wi-Fi enabled.

“The trains linking metros would be made Wi-Fi enabled in the first phase. This would help executives to utilise their travel time in a productive way. The work would start with all Rajdhani and Shatabdi trains and then extend to other express and superfast trains,” an official in the Rail Bhawan said. It is expected that in the forthcoming Budget rail minister may make an announcement in this regard.

To start with, the service will be launched on the Delhi-Amritsar and Delhi-Bhopal routes of Shatabdi Express. It would be followed by installing such facilities in Rajdhani and other few popular express trains. The service will be free, he said. Railways’ Telecom & IT wing has already carried out Wi-Fi connectivity tests on a few trains.

“The tests have proved that passengers will experience seamless connectivity on running trains,” a Railways official said.
Apart from enabling passengers to stay connected on moving trains, RailTel also plans to provide Wi-Fi connectivity at select railway stations to allow commuters to work on laptops and palmtops. RailTel will provide Wi-Fi connectivity at 50 stations. This will enable passengers at these stations to make use of Broadband Internet facility using their Laptops and other Wi-Fi enabled services.

Twenty stations are expected to be made operational by March 2008 and remaining 30 stations will be commissiThe GSM-based mobile industry has added 6.19-million users in January 2008, taking their total mobile subscriber base to 178.4 million. The GSM service providers had added 5.7 million new subscribers in the month of December last year. Bharti Airtel continues to remain at the top slot with a market share of 32.18% and a total user base of 57.41 million.

The company added 2.25 million users in January against 2.2 million a month ago. Vodafone-Essar captured a market share of 23.06% and added 1.28 million new users. It had a total subscriber base of 41.14 million at the end of January. State-run telecom major BSNL added 10.36 lakh users in January against 7.67 lakh users in December. The company now has a market share of 18.92% with a total subscriber base of 33.74 million users. oned in 2008-09.

The Railways would also set up local area network (LAN) to provide Wi-Fi connectivity within stations. The Railways have extensively computerised their operations to deal with administration and ticketing. Work of upgradation of OFC network to high bandwidth STM-16 network is in full swing and has already been commissioned on all important routes. RailTel has also been asked to provide cyber Cafes at 82 stations on Indian Railways out of which cyber cafes at 24 stations have already been commissioned.