Alphabet Inc's (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google announced Tuesday the ‘Google Station' – an initiative to provide fast Wi-Fi for everyone, as it attempts to tap the vast potential of underpenetrated markets. The company is contemplating having the service in several places, including malls and cafes , which in turn can monetize the Google Station hotspots or provide it for free.
This is an extension of the initiative the company unveiled last year coinciding with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's visit to its U.S. headquarters to provide high-speed public W-Fi in 400 train stations across India.
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Google partnered with Indian Railways and RailTel, a provider of fiber network along many railways lines, and targeted coverage of 100 of the busiest stations by the end of 2016. The service is now available at 52 stations. More importantly, the service was to be available free of cost, although in the long term the company wanted it to be self-sustaining.
The company's rationale for the push was that if it could get 10 million people who pass through every day to use, it would rank high up in the world in terms of the number of potential users.
Quoting Caesar Sengupta, VP for Google's next billion users, the Verge said about 15,000 people in India get online for the first time every day and 3.5 million people use the railway Wi-Fi hotspots every month.
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