Google announces shut down of 'Station' free Wi-Fi service at Indian railway stations

Tech giant Google on Monday announced that it is shutting down its Google Station programme, a free WiFi service at railway stations. Google had launched its Station initiative in India in 2015 with an aim to provide fast, free public Wi-Fi to over 400 of the busiest railway stations in the country by mid-2020.

The company used RailTel’s large-scale network to provide connectivity. However, the target was surpassed in June 2018. The company cited low mobile data costs in India, amongst the lowest in the world, and its own inability to make it a sustainable business model to scale the program, especially for its partners, as the reasons for shutting Station down.

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“As we look to the next phase of enabling access, it’s clear that since we started five years ago, getting online has become much simpler and cheaper. Mobile data plans have become more affordable and mobile connectivity is improving globally. India, specifically now has among the cheapest mobile data per GB in the world, with mobile data prices having reduced by 95% in the last 5 years, as per TRAI in 2019. Today, Indian users consume close to 10 GB of data each month on average. And similar to what the Indian government did, several governments and local entities have kicked off their own initiatives to provide easier, cost-effective access to the internet for everyone,” said the company in a blog post.

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“In addition to this changed context, the challenge of varying technical requirements and infrastructure among our partners across countries has also made it difficult for Station to scale and be sustainable, especially for our partners. And when we evaluate where we can truly make an impact in the future, we see greater need and bigger opportunities in building products and features tailored to work better for the next billion-user markets,” it added.

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According to data shared by Google in 2018, Google Station had close to 8 million monthly active users across 400 stations. The data showed the consumption was much higher in tier 2 cities while average data consumption stood at 350MB.

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