High-speed Wi-Fi rolls into 100th railway station in India | Hacker News Reader

High-speed Wi-Fi rolls into 100th railway station in India

blog.google

99 pointskungfudoi54 comments

I have personally used this. The speeds are pretty good, and it's easy to start using it.

  1. Enter your mobile number to receive an OTP
  2. Type the OTP.
  3. Connection is established.

I don't understand why some people are being so negative about this. It's a good quality service being offered free of charge. I can imagine a number of scenarios where it can be a life saver to have dependable internet at a railway station.

The most important being to access mobile cab services. I used this too.

Indian apps/software are so intrusive.

> 1. Enter your mobile number to receive an OTP.

Why do I need to provide my Identity to a fucking railway station anyway. There are probably better ways to do this rather than this insulting way.

Probably everyone needs to start carrying a junk phone number.

Expectations of privacy is asking too much for a free Wi-Fi service. What if a terrorist or criminals use these wifi to send mail threatening bomb scare. Even single event like this will put in this whole endeavor in jeopardy.

I used the ones in Chennai and it was pretty good. When the Vardha cyclone hit Chennai, most of the local ISPs went down (the internet in my area is still down). The internet at the railways was working good.

Google's head of access programs in India - Azar says, that each station has "1Gbps plus backhaul through fiber". Any googler here? It would be interesting to know how google employed VSAT & SDN technologies to connect 100 different railway stations in 12 months.

How would vsat or SDN be required for such basic infrastructure? Consumers can get 1gbps to their house.

Which place are you referring to in your statement that consumers can get 1Gbps to their house? The highest consumer grade speeds available in many cities is around 100Mbps, and that's not available everywhere either. Most connections come to 2Mbps or even lower (depends on the ISP and the location).

Google fiber is the most widely known. All other examples I've seen have been municipal fiber or small local ISPs.

My point is that 1gbps is trivial and doesn't require special technology. All the servers I work with now have either 10gb or 40gb cards. 1gb to every desktop on a campus is common.

Google works with a subsidiary of the Railways called RailTel. A lot of the infrastructure / backbone was supplied by RailTel which allowed the project to move fast.

But rails just in front of you are still littered with shit. And you won't be able to hear train announcement because it is mixed up in the Ads blasted from the same speakers perpetually. And if you have to contact enquiry, you will have to cross any number of platforms (often crossing the pile of shit mentioned earlier) to the very first platform....

But hey, let us give people WiFi so that they don't notice the shit they are surrounded with...

most of the inquiry can be done online. so you can use your wifi and avoid going to platform 1.

What about platform no of a train or coach position? Platform no will often be available only 15 minutes before arrival. And I don't think coach position can be queried online either...

Once you are on the right platform, look up. There are boards that have numbers like 1, 2, on them, and in small letters, below them, the coach number.

>There are boards that have numbers like 1, 2, on them, and in small letters, below them, the coach number...

But only in very few stations, right? And you should be on the right platform in the first place, which defeats the whole purpose, because you can know the coach position a lot before you can know the platform. ie when the train starts as opposed to just before arriving at a station..

There's a croudsourced site which offers some information related to this.

https://indiarailinfo.com

yes, you can tell that to the technology illiterate people, who are of course the majority.

The new railway minister has been working relentlessly on improving the situation, we are already seeing a huge improvement. Trains are being run on time, it is a huge problem that doesn't go away overnight. I am willing to give the current government more time if they can stay the current course they are on.

Also, it would be nicer if you keep yourself updated on the latest development on the subject you are going to comment on. RM's twitter handle is a good place to start.

https://twitter.com/sureshpprabhu

>The new railway minister has been working relentlessly on improving the situation.. >Trains are being run on time...

Really? I our state the rails are not even well maintained and there frequent concerns being raised about the poor maintenance of the rails themselves. And what about the increasing incidents of train accidents and derailments?

And trains running on time? I think it has worsened in quite recent times. Things were a little better a while before. Now 30-45 minutes of delay, even in trains starting from near by stations are regular.

A better way to solve it would be to sell the whole network in pieces and pay the taxpayer back, but no, they'll never do it cause nothing better than wasting taxpayer money.

Instead of a static image with a few stations on it, I would have expected Google to provide a map of all the 100 stations they are talking about. It's silly that the most important bit of info has been left out.

It's odd, too, that the map's shades-of-blue color scheme makes the land look like water:

https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/ima...

That map would be easier to parse, I think, if the water areas were the dark-blue shade, and the land areas were the light blue. (I guess I just realized that I have an implicit visual grammar of maps. I'm not sure whether it's universal.)

Somebody at Google must be a fan of Arrested Development. That's a classic Buster Bluth joke: "oh! The blue on this map must be land!"

I actually just mocked up the inverse, out of curiosity:

http://imgur.com/a/nPpsL

IMHO, at least, it does look better.

Why is Google taking credit for this? RailWire, a unit of India's Ministry of Railways, is doing the job. The rollout was last year.[1]

Railroads usually have lots of wire along their right of way. Adding bandwith is cheap. That's how Sprint (originally Southern Pacific Communications) got started. Railroad stations are good places to hook into fiber.

[1] http://railwire.co.in/#.

> Why is Google taking credit for this?

Probably because they are paying for it.

It doesn't really work in the Lucknow railway station. Although there are ads all over the place that say "High Speed Wi-Fi available here", sometimes your device won't even discover the "Railwire" SSID.

A high-speed Wi-Fi service also seems a bit stupid given the fact that no ISP in Lucknow provides an unlimited 50+ Mbps broadband connection. What do they expect us to do? Take our laptops and sit at the station which is littered with rats, monkeys, their shit, and trash?

You can get an unlimited <50Mbps connection but that'll cost you approximately $500 - $1000 a month. For other "home users" there are shitty plans that give you 30GB-200GB of data with 2Mbps - 16Mbps for approximately $30 a month.

Sounds like there's room for a startup to provide a satisfactory internet service in your city.

Maybe also room for a startup that could keep your train station free of rats, monkeys and feces and trash.

Yeah, good luck with that. One would prefer jumping off the top of Burj Khalifa rather than deal with the bureaucracy and the illiterate government officials who control these things.

In my opinion, an ISP startup over here is only possible if either the government wakes up (not gonna happen) or if someone with millions of dollars to spend on infrastructure and bribes is willing to do it.

>Sounds like there's room for a startup to provide a satisfactory internet service in your city.

Unfortunately in most cities, Airtel (India's biggest ISP) has a monopoly and the other local cable providers either cut the cables for other ISPs or either simply steal them (it was/is a major problem for BSNL, the state-owned ISP).

>Maybe also room for a startup that could keep your train station free of rats, monkeys and feces and trash.

The trouble here is that the railway contracts usually go to people who throw in a bribe to the station-master and the higher ups in the Railway Board. And of course, the contractors don't do their jobs properly because, well, people gotta earn some money.

Not completely true. There's a process of tenders

http://www.indianrailways.gov.in/tenders.html

I don't understand why the lack of a good ISP in Lucknow means someone should not try provide high-speed Wi-Fi at the train station. Are you saying it's an inefficient allocation of resources?

> Are you saying it's an inefficient allocation of resources?

Obviously.

That's what it seemed like but I don't think it's sound logic. It'd be one thing if the municipality said, "You know what we need? Free wifi at the train station!" and then allocated budget for that. That's not what's happened, it's Google and Railtel doing this nationwide.

Are you sure it is 500$ - 1000$ a month or 500Rs - 1000Rs a month? Which part of India are you talking about?

I live in Hyderabad and I get 100mbps unlimited for just 2000Rs per month (which is approximately 30$ per month). You can check the tariff page for proof: http://www.actcorp.in/personal/fibernet/plans

I think you were ripped off by a local ISP who cheated you with really high rates just because you are a foreigner.

What do you mean "unlimited"? It's not unlimited. There's a data cap after 300GB of usage on the Rs. 1999 plan being offered.

I'm not a foreigner. I live in Lucknow, India and this is what my options are right now.

http://www.sikkanet.com/home-users/unshared-plans/

http://www.sikkanet.com/corporate-users/

http://www.techiit.com/airtel-broadband-tariff-plans-lucknow...

In the case of Airtel, "upto 16Mbps" means that maximum 4Mbps due to "technical restrictions."

You're lucky that you're getting that kind of a connection. Hyderabad, Bangalore, Delhi and Kolkata are probably the only cities in India where one can get that kind of a connection without trouble.

Has anyone around the world has experience with a decent public WiFi Services? Whether they are from government, telecoms provider or third party.

WiFi- being a best effort services, doesn't come anywhere close to LTE in UX. You get much better latency when you are collected, but you can only connect from time to time, and even if you are connected, it doesn't mean it will load. The Login system are better with "some" advancement on AutoLogin with Cert. By make worse if the WiFi doesn't work well your phone are constantly trying to load without getting any data, draining battery.

LinkNYC is still rolling out, but, in my experience so far in Manhattan has been pretty great. They have strong backhaul, good radios in the devices themselves, and enough of them to make a mostly-continuous network on heavily traveled avenues.

https://www.link.nyc/

TransitWireless, the in-subway wifi in many train stations here, is comparatively much worse - but tbey also provide underground cellular service, which is almost always usable.

Shaw wifi in Canada is actually pretty good, considering the general incompetence of our telecoms. Just about every business in the Calgary area that's a Shaw internet customer offers it, it's reasonably fast, sign-in is simple, and you stay signed in for a reasonably long time without jumping through hoops. The only catch is you have to be a Shaw home internet customer to access it, you can't just get standalone wifi access.

Starbucks WiFi in China is usually better than our office WiFi (in China).

I find ScotRail to have pretty decent WiFi in the stations that they have it installed. Seem to be using Level3 as their ISP.

Ever tried it on any of their trains when moving? Absolutely unusable 99% of the time, so I wouldn't bother paying extra for 1st class thinking you can get work done on a long journey :(

As a tourist who visited India 4 times for several months (6 month tourist visa) I can't believe this. I traveled all India (from Delhi to Kanyakumari and back). There's no good internet. You're very lucky if you have some Internet. High-speed? Forget about it.

I'm not sure what you don't believe. Perhaps you should try it and report back with some actual evidence instead of ignoring that change is possible.

I too haven't seen a good connection anywhere in India. 3G was bearable, but every single Wi-Fi AP I connected to was so slow it was nearly impossible to use it.

Have you tried using 3G of any service provider like Idea, BSNL, Vodafone, its very slow.

Yes, lack of good internet is a problem here. But this is a new service from Google (collaborating with Indian Railways), which might be a bit better. Also, if you had taken a 4G sim card (in the last couple of years) in most cities you get up to 4G speeds in your phone.

And 4G LTE data is super cheap (even free for one carrier right now). ~$1/GB. I got roughly 20-30MB/s on that connection. While that's not as fast as gigabit, it's still high speed enough.

> even free for one carrier right now

That free carrier right now needs you to sign up with your Aadhar Number, kind of like SSN but more Sovietness included. Other carries might charge a bit but their rules for registration are more lax and thus better.

I remember reading that most of the traffic is porn. Not sure if it's having the desired kind of impact.

Please do not do anything other then 100% black text on 100% white background or reverse. Any style-arguments you have are defeated by sheer readability and usability.

Ironically, this comment has grey on grey text due to heavy downvoting.

Not so ironically, the previous commenter did not choose his text colour; downvoters did it for him. Creator of the website that this thread discusses however did, and the contrast is not as good as it could be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com