Free Wi-Fi service at New Delhi Railway Station is aimed at public welfare

 To fulfill PM Narendra Modi’s dream of Digital India, an initiative has been taken and free Wi-Fi facility has been launched at New Delhi Railway station. In a chat with Navdip Punjj, COO Airlink, who has been associated with implementation of equipments and distributing the network, has discussed the challenges and features of this project.

What challenges did you face in the project of implementing Wi-Fi network at New Delhi Railway Station?
This project was in thought process for two years from now. The idea is basically to digitize all the platforms coming under Indian Railways. It is aimed at the welfare of the people so that they can easily get any information or do some office works while sitting at the platform and can be connected to the rest of the world.
NDLS is an extremely complicated environment and makes traditional Wi-Fi setup a challenge. NDLS handles 300 trains across 16 platforms and sees over 5 Lakh people walk through everyday, making it one of the densest public environments in the world. After surveying the complex environment, it was determined that a new breed of technology is needed to support NDLS. For this we have deployed RailTel’s fibre and put up Pronto Network’s cloud managed Wi-Fi network.
There other challenges are like specific period of time to execute the project.

How secure is this Wi-Fi network?
This network works on AAA where proper authentication of a user is done. The user gets a code for handheld devices like tablet, smartphone or laptop to use the Wi Fi service for half an hour as the specification is done. After the free hour, a user has option of buying a coupon of Rs 25 for half an hour or 1 hour for Rs 35.

What are the special features Wi-Fi service providers to a user?
In addition to the normal download there will be a feature called Movie download where a person can buy a coupon specifically for movie download and the download speed will be much higher so that in 10-15 minutes the user can download a complete movie. We will provide excess speed to the person who will opt for this coupon. The speed can go upto 9-10 Mbps which makes the download process fast.  
 
Apart from this feature there are normal features like browsing and option for Railway information.

Indian Railways have plenty of bandwidth and they are backing the sole system. On the free Wi-Fi network we are distributing 1 MBPS of download speed to a particular user. 

On the revenue model there will be some advertisements. It’s a very plain and simple Wi-Fi model. The revenue comes from the advertisements.