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Showing posts with label railwire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label railwire. Show all posts

Friday, 18 December 2015

08:34

Google says Railway WiFi in India will be Network Neutral

Google says Railway WiFi in India will be Network Neutral

New Delhi, India: Sundar Pichai of GoogleIn an event targeted at Google’s India initiatives to bring another billion citizens online, the company said that internet access was a huge problem in the country.

To change that, Google already has put in place projects like bicycles for women, Project Loon and RailWire WiFi.

The company is particularly bullish about its RailWire WiFi project that will provide free WiFi across railway stations in India.

It said that people will be free to access anything they want on the internet and there will be no special zero-rated services.

Upholding Net Neutrality

“It is not our intention to provide a walled-garden to use only Google applications,” said Marian Croak, Google’s vice president for access strategy and emerging markets. She added that Google is building the WiFi on the top of fibre infrastructure and the company will have no role in controlling the content on the network.

Gulzar Azad, head of access programs in India, said that the speeds on public WiFi will be higher than the average speeds in India, which according to the latest Akamai report is 2.3 Mbps (which seems to be too high for India). Azad added that the goal of the project is to provide high-speed, fast and reliable internet. “I don’t think zero-rating plays a role here,” he added responding to a question from MediaNama.

Mumbai Central is likely becoming the first WiFi-enabled station in January 2016, and 100 railway stations will have WiFi by the end of 2016. The company is still trying to come up with a monetization model to make the project commercially sustainable.

Not Strictly Against Zero Rating

However, Google hasn’t been averse to zero-rating in the past. Google is a member of Internet.org in Zambia and has done zero-rated deals in India in the past with Airtel. It was also planning on an Internet.org style service for apps and was in discussions companies like Flipkart, Redbus, Olacabs and others.

In August, it even tried to get Internet and Mobile Association of India remove any mention of ‘zero-rating’ in its response to the Department of Telecom’s report on net neutrality.

Facebook, which has been the leading proponent of zero-rating, has repeatedly said that cost of data is one of the biggest barriers for internet access in India and its Free Basics program will be a big step in getting the economically weaker groups online. During the event yesterday, Zuckerberg’s thoughts were somewhat echoed by Rajan Anandan, Google’s Managing Director South East Asia and India, though he did not comment on zero-rated services or their perceived benefits.

“Many of these new [internet] users will find that even Rs 100, 200 or 300 is actually an amount of money that that they can’t really afford to spend,” Anandan said. “Affordability, which has been a constraint across many industries in .India, will become even more acute for these new set of internet users,” he added.
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Friday, 26 June 2015

22:48

RailTel to expand WiFi Services at all the Railway Stations across India through RailWire

RailTel to expand WiFi Services at all the Railway Stations across India through RailWire

New Delhi: Free Internet usage sounds great if you are traveling across country via trains. RailWire brand which is already providing its broadband services is now all get set to provide its wifi services across country’s rail platforms very soon. Although public is already started availing its services in New Delhi as well as Banglore railway stations, public can use free wifi for initial half an hour while they step into platform after registering themselves and after that they have to buy token to avail further services.

India at very fast pace moving towards making itself digitally sound. Concept initiated by PM Modi has boomed techno industry and created its importance across various verticals at large scale. Recently, Railtel Corporation has also signed MOU with metro services to provide its WiFi services which would be implemented in 6 months and travelers would be able to avail quality internet speed.

It has positioned itself to realize the vision to connect people while keeping securable services in mind and ensured to leverage their telecom infrastructure to enable all citizens and businesses, both in rural & urban areas, to participate in the internet & web economy. Wifi services will be delivered to villages, panchayats, homes, SMB’s, tourist places, tier2 and tier3 cities, educational, healthcare and entertainment verticals very soon.

The authorities stated, “Security is one of the important things we need to watch at very step and hence we are making sure that wifi services will provided to registered IP address only to make data usage safe for users.”  Also, organization has collaborated with market players such as cable operators, SCOs to reach masses.

As per government of India’s stated aim, RailWire is all set to contribute to goals such as to provide affordable & reliable wifi-on- demand broadband-on-demand by the year 2015, to provide high speed & high quality broadband access by 2020 to all village-panchayats, villages & habitations, enable e-governance in key sectors like Health, Education, Skill Development, Employment, Governance and Banking to ensure equitable & inclusive growth.

Currently RailWire has been set up int the cities/towns covering length and breadth of the country i.e. Secunderabad, Agra, Mysore, Dindigul, Bangalore, Hospet, Varanasi, Gurgaon, Kolkata, Chennai, Patna, Ambala, Lucknow, Meerut, Allahabad, Sahibzada Ajit Singh Nagar, New Delhi, Bhubaneswar, Visakhapatnam, Kakkanad, Guwahati, Belgaum, Tirupati, Bangalore Urban, Satna, Kanpur, Ernakulam, Shoranur, Chandigarh, Hubli, Ludhiana, Noida, Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Thiruvananthapuram, Indore, Ranchi and Mumbai.  RailTel is planning to spread RailWire’s reach to every village and panchayat in the vicinity of Railway areas shortly.
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Thursday, 23 April 2015

10:45

RailTel’s RailWire set to become largest Cable, Video & Internet provider across the country

RailTel’s RailWire set to become largest Cable, Video & Internet provider across the country

In the past 65 years, cable has emerged from a fledgling novelty for a handful of households to the nation’s preeminent provider of digital television, movies and state-of-the-art broadband Internet service available to millions of Indians

Today, thanks to broadband cable and other breakthroughs, the technological landscape is unrecognizable compared with even a few years ago. Consumers now enjoy video content and Internet access from multiple services, multiple service providers and on multiple devices. They can go online anytime, anywhere with more options and opportunities than ever and arrival of the new millennium brought with it hopes and plans for acceleration of advanced services over cable’s broadband networks.  As the new millennium got under way, cable companies began pilot testing video services that could change the way people watch television. Among these: video on demand, subscription video on demand, and interactive TV. The industry was proceeding cautiously in these arenas, because the cost of upgrading customer-premise equipment for compatibility with these services was substantial and required new business models that were both expansive and expensive.

Indian Railways is all set to become your neighbourhood cable, video and broadband service provider. RailTel Corporation of India Ltd – the Telecom PSU arm of Indian Railways would soon take the project nationwide, which till now was tested in different states successfully.

RailTel, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Railways, in 2013 began its project on a pilot basis to provide broadband and content to households particularly in remote areas in association with cable operators and other access network providers, by utilizing their last mile.

The project, now called RailWire, has not moved much since, being restricted to just about 30,000 households in southern states like Kerala, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh.

“We are now looking at going to other regions and looking for partners who will provide the last-mile connectivity,” RailTel Chairman and Managing Director R K Bahuguna said.

RailTel would be eyeing mostly the non-metro areas where reaching out to households is not exactly a profitable proposition for many of the MSOs (Multi-System Operators), he said. RailTel was formed in 2000 to commercially exploit the Optical Fibre Network laid along railway tracks, which then covered 47000 route kilometres.

“As of now we have laid OFC network of 47,000 km and within a year’s time we would reach 50,000-km mark,” Bahuguna said. Leveraging this network, RailTel provides services like connectivity to government departments and undertakings. It connects some remote mines of Coal India, provides networks like National Knowledge Network connecting IITs, IIMs. Banks and other research establishments, offers services to telecom operators as well in the short haul and long haul distances, and also provides services like telecom tower collocations.

RailTel’s revenue in the last fiscal was Rs 550 crore, and around 10% of it came from parent Indian Railways. Most of RailTel’s services till now are on an enterprise level. Its household broadband service would give it a retail face. But challenges lie ahead as the market is highly competitive, which makes entry into metros restrictive as such markets are already being catered to by the Multi-System Operators or MSOs.

In cities, RailTel plans to provide high-speed 10 mbps broadband services with the help of the MSOs who have the access network, he said.

These apart, RailTel is also banking on its recently launched HD video-conferencing service, called Telepresence in partnership with Cisco, offering corporates and government bodies to hold virtual meetings on a rental basis without having to invest in hardware or connections.
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