Railtel unveils Prepaid Wi-Fi Services in 4,000 stations

The new services offered by Indian Railways, where a passenger can browse the internet for 30 mins free at a speed of 1Mbps. But for higher speed of up to 34 Mbps, the user will need to choose a plan at a nominal fee. RailTel already provides free wi-fi service at more than 5,950 stations in the country, and the facility can be availed by anyone with a smartphone and an active connection after an OTP-based verification.

The plans have been designed to offer flexible choice to user as per their need. A number of payment options like net banking, wallet, credit card can be used to purchase plan online," the company added. They expect a revenue of Rs 10-15 cr annually from the paid Wi-Fi.

A passenger can use up to 30 minutes of free Wi-Fi per day at 1 Mbps speed. For higher speeds, plans begin from ₹10 for 5 GB in a day, ₹15 for 10 GB in a day and ₹20 for 10 GB valid for five days. The plans have been designed to offer a flexible choice to users as per their needs, says Puneet Chawla, CMD, RailTel.

CMD Railtel said, Content on Demand (CoD) service, including multilingual content, movies, news, music videos, and general entertainment, in trains will be launched this month, and for this the media servers will be placed inside coaches to ensure buffer-free services. Passengers will be provided with buffer-free streaming across personal devices.

We did a detailed trial run of Prepaid WiFi at 20 Stations in Uttar Pradesh and based on the response and detailed testing, we are launched this plan at 4000 more stations across India. We intend to launch the prepaid plans for all the stations with our RailWire Wi-Fi this financial year. Puneet Chawla said.