Around 7.5 million users consumed over 7,100 terabytes of data in the month of April at 370 of the 400 railway stations which have WiFi hotspots powered by Google and RailTel, Indian Express has reported. Consumption of data in April saw a four-fold jump compared to March 2017, where 6 million people had consumed 1,600 TB of data, the Express report added. The usage pattern suggested high consumption and more users in several non-metro cities: Almost 10,000 users in Pune, Allahabad, Vijayawada, and Visakhapatnam consumed, on average, over 2 TB of data on a daily basis. Last week, Google had announced that its 'Google Station' program had achieved its goal of covering 400 stations. The 400th station to be covered is Dibrugarh station in Assam. “There are now over 8 million people getting online with Google Station every month,” Google's Caesar Sengupta said in a blog post announcing the milestone. “On average, people consume 350MB of data per session, roughly the size of a half-hour television episode and over half of the people using Google Station engage in multiple online sessions a day.” WiFi hotspots in India Google manages the WiFi login software at these 400 stations, while RailTel provides the fibre and router infrastructure. The company has not taken any significant steps to monetize Google Station, aside from placing ads on the WiFi login captive portal. Google has also partnered with Pune’s municipality to install 150 WiFi hotspots in some of the city’s public spaces. This development comes as TRAI workshops its…
