In some good news for the people commuting by train, the Indian Railways is launching free Wi-Fi based internet service on April 2, 2013. The service has already started with New Delhi-Howrah Rajdhani and fifty other trains are expected to be connected this year.
With the help of the new service, the passengers on trains can avail facilities like chatting, browsing, video services like YouTube and can even play online games while travelling. Initially, the service will provide 4 Mbps download bandwidth and 512 Kbps upload on a moving train. However, individual users might get slower speed, as all the passengers will share the bandwidth.
The Managing director of Techno Sat Comm India Ltd Nirav Dave said that if the demand for bandwidth becomes high then the network has the intelligence to prioritize traffic. Techo Sat Comm is the company which provides the internet service. Dave said, “Critical communication applications like email or online transactions will be given top priority. Video downloads and gaming would be last, if there is a crunch on the bandwidth availability”.
The MD also added that they have conducted tests with 120 passengers simultaneously accessing different types of internet services on 2 Mbps bandwidth and found that there were no issues in terms of the download speeds.
