In 2015, Google unveiled Google Station, a program for WiFi hotspots across many train stations in partnership with Indian Railways and the ISP RailTel. On Thursday, Caesar Sengupta, who heads a wing of the company focusing on emerging markets like India, announced that the program's goal of covering 400 stations has been completed. 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," 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 network at these 400 stations, while RailTel provides the fibre 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 Aadhaar login-based WiFi hotspot architecture. WiFi hotspots are highly regulated in India since operators need special permission to resell bandwidth and have to verify the identity — via SMS-based one-time passcodes — of every user who signs up on the network. This essentially means that only large conglomerates, established telcos and government organizations are in a position to set hotspots up. TRAI's Aadhaar-based…
