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The company said in a blog on Monday that since it started the programme five years ago, getting online has become much simpler and cheaper. “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,” Caesar Sengupta, VP – Payments and Next Billion Users, Google said.
Google launched Station in India in 2015, as a partnership between Google, Indian Railways and Railtel to bring fast, free public WiFi to over 400 of the busiest railway stations in India and crossed that number by June 2018. While the Indian Railways provided the fibre connectivity for the Internet, Google was responsible for installing and maintaining the access points and the running the software. The Indian Railways has also since launched an initiative to connect more railway stations on its own since then and connected 5500 stations with other partners which includes Tata Trust, PGCIL etc. Union Railway Minister Piyush Goyal said last week said the government is now mulling allowing people residing nearby the stations to use the facility.
Google has also been running the Station project in a few locations in Pune and Bangalore and had announced a partnership with BSNL to extend it to more areas in the country. After launching in India, Google also started a similar initiative in Mexico, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia.
Sengupta said that 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. “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.”
He added that Google is working with its partners to transition existing sites so they can remain useful resources for the community.
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