8 ms·
High-speed Wi-Fi rolls into 100th railway station in India
- wallington 10y agoShit dude. And here I am in a college in Bangalore which doesn't provide me with WiFi. Sad life I live.
- funnyfacts365 10y agoYou can always go work construction or clean streets. Maybe you get WiFi there. /s Stop being an entitled prick.
- late2part 10y agoYou're in college in a high tech city. Your life is pretty good.
- psibi 10y agoI 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.
- sharpercoder 10y agoPlease 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.
- witty_username 10y agoIronically, this comment has grey on grey text due to heavy downvoting.
- ptaipale 10y agoNot 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.
- Abishek_Muthian 10y agoGoogle'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.
- hueving 10y agoHow would vsat or SDN be required for such basic infrastructure? Consumers can get 1gbps to their house.
- wtmt 10y agoWhich 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).
- hueving 10y agoGoogle 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.
- bitwiseand 10y agoGoogle 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.
- babyrainbow 10y agoBut 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...
- rv11 10y agomost of the inquiry can be done online. so you can use your wifi and avoid going to platform 1.
- babyrainbow 10y agoWhat 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...
- praneshp 10y agoOnce 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.
- babyrainbow 10y ago>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..
- ing33k 10y agoThere's a croudsourced site which offers some information related to this. https://indiarailinfo.com https://indiarailinfo.com
- ksec 10y agoHas 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.
- sethhochberg 10y agoLinkNYC 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/ 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.
- notatoad 10y agoShaw 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.
- mads 10y agoStarbucks WiFi in China is usually better than our office WiFi (in China).
- lrk_sirius 10y agoIt 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.
- dm3730 10y agoSounds 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.
- lrk_sirius 10y agoYeah, 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.
- abverma 10y ago>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.
- alphakappa 10y agoInstead 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.
- helloworld 10y agoIt'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/images/100_stations.width-792.png 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.)
- notatoad 10y agoSomebody 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!"
- helloworld 10y agoI actually just mocked up the inverse, out of curiosity: http://imgur.com/a/nPpsL http://imgur.com/a/nPpsL IMHO, at least, it does look better.
- anticodon 10y agoAs 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.
- vinay427 10y agoI'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.
- andrewshadura 10y agoI 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.
- sumedh 10y agoHave you tried using 3G of any service provider like Idea, BSNL, Vodafone, its very slow.
- piyush_soni 10y agoYes, 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.
- ReverseCold 10y agoAnd 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.
- falloutx 10y ago
- fareesh 10y agoI remember reading that most of the traffic is porn. Not sure if it's having the desired kind of impact.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- amjd 10y agoI 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.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- piyush_soni 10y agoThe most important being to access mobile cab services. I used this too.
- falloutx 10y agoIndian 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.
- acd10j 10y agoExpectations 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.
- Animats 10y agoWhy 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/# http://railwire.co.in/#.
- sumedh 10y ago> Why is Google taking credit for this? Probably because they are paying for it.
- benbristow 10y agoI find ScotRail to have pretty decent WiFi in the stations that they have it installed. Seem to be using Level3 as their ISP.
- GordonS 10y agoEver 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 :(