Railway station users who are used to free-Internet browsing have to start paying if they use RailTel’s wifi service for more than 30 minutes. RailTel has launched its paid service about a month back.
A passenger can use 30 minutes free wi-fi per day at one mbps speed at these 4,000+ Railway stations. So, if they want higher speeds before 30 minutes also, people have to subscribe to a pre-paid plan. This was shared by RailTel in a press meet on Thursday.
As per the plan, with GST, people have to pay ₹11.8 (RailTel gets ₹10) for 5 GB a day, ₹17.7 (₹15 for RailTel) for 10 GB a day, ₹23.6 for 10 GB for 5 days, and ₹88.5 (₹75 for RailTel) for 60 GB for 30 days.
The prepaid services have already been launched for over 4,000 stations from almost 6,000 stations. The remaining stations will go paid by the end of this month.
Puneet Chawla, CMD, RailTel said, “We did a detailed trial run of Prepaid WiFi at 20 stations in Uttar Pradesh and based on the response and detailed testing, We launched this plan at 4,000+ more stations across India. We intend to launch the prepaid plans for all the stations with our RailWire Wi-Fi this financial year.”
In pre-covid-19 times, more than 2.9 crore people were using the service every month. Once situation normalises and footfall at stations becomes regular, a revenue of ₹ 10-15 crore a year is expected from the paid Wi-Fi.
Wi-Fi at the station premises are accessible to anyone with a smartphone and an active connection (after verification through OTP sent via sms). The payment has to be made electronically.
Passengers use this Wi-Fi facility for streaming High Definition videos, download of movies, songs, games and do their office work online. The service has benefitted railway passengers and rural users.