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Google The Internet Wireless Networking

Google Partnering With Indian Railways To Provide Wi-Fi Hotspots 26

Posted by samzenpus from the web-on-the-rails dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Google and Indian Railways have partnered together for 'Project Nilgiri' which aims to set up more than 400 Wi-fi hotspots. IBTimes reports: "Internet access will be free for passengers after the system verifies a user's mobile number with a one-time password sent by text message. However, only the first 30 minutes of usage will be on high-speed Internet, Telecom Talk reported. The telecom industry news site has also posted a screen grab — that shows the service is being provided by Google — of the portal into which passengers have to enter the one-time access code."
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Google Partnering With Indian Railways To Provide Wi-Fi Hotspots More

Google Partnering With Indian Railways To Provide Wi-Fi Hotspots

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  • Free is always nice, but... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    those disgusting hoops "consumers" have to jump through (identify yourself and reveal your phone number in this case) make me ever more furious. Corporation's lust for consumer control and state's lust for surveillance make for a win-win-lose situation (two wolves and a sheep voting on who's for dinner, if you know what I mean).

    Time for pitchforks?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Just don't use it. You have that option, if it's not worth it to you. I guess the question I have is what does someone do if they only have a laptop or WiFi only tablet with them and no phone? I know, everyone has phones these days, but maybe there are a few that don't.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sycodon ( 149926 )

      Now, the people who end up having to sit on top of the trains will have it better than the ones with seats as they will undoubtedly have a better signal!

  • See who's Googling you! (Score:3)

    by rmdingler ( 1955220 ) on Monday September 14, 2015 @07:23AM (#50517931) Journal
    Sure, this is a foot in the door to a billion strong market of future consumers.

    But, to the millions in the Indian countryside with no access to the internet,

    exploitation that brings connectivity is still preferential to interwebz darkness.

  • I just got back from India yesterday. My brother uses the Indian public sector ISP called BSNL. Either the router supplied by them is so pathetic it gets hacked by dark side of the internet. OR the ISP itself is abusing DNS hijacking process to serve adware and malware.

    Whatever the case may be, only https traffic seems to be safe. All http traffic gets hijacked. From my non-jailbroken standard Google Nexus 5 android phone chrome browser, any link I access via http would randomly redirect to some redirec.x

    • Obblig: Nuke it from obbit .. it's the only way to be sure

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Bharti Airtel is the worst sinner of them all and they intentionally do stuff like this. In their case the saying is "Never attribute to incompetence what can be attributed to malice." That is not to say they are competent. Their service is crap and incompetent as hell.

      However in BSNL's case it is "Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence". They are quasi-public sector and you know how the indian government machinery (NOT) functions if you have lived in India. They would be playing c

  • And yet, here in the US, we can't even manage to get reliable/functional wifi on amtrak.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ph1ll ( 587130 )

      "And yet, here in the US, we can't even manage to get reliable/functional wifi on amtrak."

      At least they have reasonably clean toilets. Having travelled on Indian trains, I was wondering why Google didn't just donate toilets where you can't see the train tracks running beneath your arse. Now that would have wow-ed me.

  • I occasionally travel to Seattle from Portland, OR by train. Amtrak provide free wifi on the train. I have tried using it many many times, to do work while on the 3 hour ride. The wifi service is entirely useless and worthless. It is much much better to tether your computer to your phone and try to use that connection.

    Part of the problem I think is wifi tech used by Amtrak. No 5GHz signal. The 2.4GHz signal gets saturated when more than a handful of people use it. All access points use the same frequency, e

  • How about first ensuring clean toilets and a website where you can actually do something hassle-free?
    Seriously.

  • If the ISP does deep packet inspection, blocks ports or protocols, prioritized or degrades certain classes of traffic, censors sites, messes with DNS or otherwise does something besides providing connectivity to the network, then the service shall not be called "Internet".

    If users have to give up personal information, it is not "Free".

  • ...before someone mentioned toilets or the lack of them, but nooooo. Think of India and the first thing that Slashdotters think of is toilets and then cows. Or is it cows and then toilets?
    • For intelligent people, the majority of Slashdotters are singularly obtuse when it comes to India and toilets. Yes, there should be more toilets - but there is more to life than toilets.
      • The way I look at it is like this: Let's say there is this fat guy. So you tell him he needs to lose weight. He agrees that he needs to do weight. But like most fat people he finds it difficult to stick to a diet/exercise regimen. A couple of months later, you hear that this guy has picked up a guitar and is trying to learn to play it. Sure, he is still fat, but from the looks of it, he seems to be a quick learn when it comes to playing the guitar. Do you now appreciate how well he is playing, or would y

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