No free Wi-Fi at railway stations beyond 30 min

The days of high speed free-Internet browsing at railway stations are coming to an end. Users at 4,000-plus stations which enjoy the facility have to start paying if they use RailTel’s Wi-Fi service for more than 30 minutes.

Also, the free Wi-Fi for half an hour will come at a speed of 1 mbps.

Prepaid Wi-Fi

Those wanting higher speeds need to subscribe to a pre-paid plan. At a press meet on Thursday, it was shared that RailTel had launched its paid service about a month back. As per the plan, with GST, people have to pay ₹11.8 (RailTel gets ₹10) for 5 GB a day, ₹17.7 (₹15 for RailTel) for 10 GB a day, ₹23.6 for 10 GB for five days, and ₹88.5 (₹75 for RailTel) for 60 GB for 30 days. The prepaid services are now available in 4,000 stations. The remaining stations will go paid by the end of this month.

Trial run

Puneet Chawla, CMD, RailTel said, “We did a detailed trial run of prepaid Wi-Fi at 20 stations in Uttar Pradesh, and based on the response and detailed testing, we launched this plan at 4,000+ stations across the country. We intend to launch the prepaid plans for all the stations with our RailWire Wi-Fi this financial year”. During pre-covid-19 times, more than 2.9 crore people were using the service every month. Once the situation normalises and passenger traffic increases at stations, a revenue of ₹10-15 crore a year is expected from the paid Wi-Fi.

Wi-Fi at the station premises is accessible to anyone with a smartphone and an active connection (after verification through OTP sent via sms). The payment has to be made electronically.