(with inputs from Salman SH) More than 1.5 million users have accessed Google and RailTel’s free high-speed* WiFi service across 19 railway stations, while being at just 20% of the roll out schedule for this year, Google said in a blog post. Last month, Google said that the free WiFi service on railway stations crossed 300,000 users per week, and that Bhubaneswar crossed 100,000 in a single day once (thought, to be honest, that might have been due to the novelty factor). 1.5 million for wired Internet is not an inconsequential number: it is more subscribers than most ISPs in India get: India had 19.60 million wired Internet connections in September 2015, and none of the top wired-only ISPs had a million connections: Google is planning to cover 400 stations, and their data indicates the unmet demand: Exponentially high consumption in Tier-2 cities where getting high speed broadband is tough: In addition, users in Tier-2 cities like Bhubaneshwar, Patna, Jaipur, where consuming more data when compared Tier-1 cities like Mumbai, added Google. “Users in tier 2 cities latched onto the network with more enthusiasm and we saw much higher consumption of data in tier 2 cities, where access to high speed broadband is more challenging,” said Google in the blog post. 15 times more data used than average daily 3G usage: Google claims that the average data consumption per user on train platform is 15 times more than their average daily 3G pack usage, according to data from its internal servers. Users are coming to stations to…
