More than 2 million monthly users have accessed Google’s free high-speed* WiFi service across 19 railway stations, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai said during an analyst call. He added that these users are consuming “as much as 15 times the data they would otherwise use in a full day on their cellular networks”. Last month, Google said that the free WiFi service was accessed by more than 1.5 million users, while being at just 20% of the roll out schedule for this year. Nikhil adds: the sceptic in me says that the numbers would have been much smaller, had this WiFi been a paid service. Of course, these numbers are likely to be higher than other free WiFi deployments, given that in comparison with some of the others, this one probably works. In June, Google claimed that its service crossed 300,000 users per week, and that Bhubaneswar crossed 100,000 in a single day once. This data points towards the fact that India needs to have more high-speed public WiFi services, while broadband and mobile Internet speeds remain abysmal. TRAI said that the country had 16.13 million wired broadband connections by September 2015, while most of the ISPs other than BSNL barely had nothing close to 2 million. What people were using the WiFi for: Google says it is planning to cover 400 stations in total, and last month it reported unexpected demand in Tier-2 cities like Bhubaneshwar, Patna, Jaipur, where getting high-speed broadband is difficult. The free WiFi service was mostly used to consume…
