Google plans to discontinue free Wifi program

Google had announced on Monday that it will be putting down the Google Station, the program which had been rolled out for free Wi-Fi in almost more than 400 railway stations of India and other public places in several additional pockets of the world. The company is being partnered with a number of programs. 

The VP of Payments and Next Billion Users at Google, Caesar Sengupta, says that this program which has been launched in 2015, was useful to millions of users to surf the internet as the data which has been provided by the wifi was totally free. Now the mobile data is cheaper in many markets including India, Google station was no longer useful for many. That is why the company plans to discontinue the program this year. 

Technically, now it has become difficult for Google to find the most suitable and sustainable business model to scale the program, which has been expanded to Indonesia, Mexico, Thailand, Nigeria, Philippines, Brazil, and Vietnam, in recent years. Three months ago the company has launched the program. 

Google had explored many ways to monetize the Google Station program, over the years. Like, it had begun showing an ad when a user signed in to connect to its internet service. 

Gulzar Azad, who spearheads connectivity efforts for Google in India said in an interview that the company was thinking the ways to scale Station to more markets, but noted that as far as the deployment at Indian railway stations was concerned, the Google had reached its goal to serve 400 railway stations.

The country’s richest man Mukesh Ambani, launched his telecom network Reliance Jio, just a year after Google announced its efforts for offering free Wi-Fi in India. Jio offered the bulk of 4G data at zero cost to its customers for an extended period of time and forced other telecom operators to slash their tariffs to maintain the competition. 

His move reached out to millions of Indians within very little time, access to which was too expensive for the first time, for many people. When the question was putten to Azad about Google Station’s relevance because of Reliance Jio, he said that people were still signing up for the company’s program. Also, he added that they were continuing to show a great volume to the data. 

Google is working with numerous companies to enable free wi-fi for users in public places. For example, Google has built the software stack, while RailTel, a state-owned telecom infrastructure provider delivers the free internet line. 

RailTel provides Wi-Fi in more than 5,600 railway stations. Over the years this had developed the capability to offer its own software stack. 

“We are working with our partners to transition existing sites so they can remain useful resources for the community.” – Sengupta.

The challenge of varying technical requirements and infrastructure among the partners across the countries had made it difficult for the Station to scale and be sustainable, especially for the partners of Google. By the evaluation where they can make an impact in the future, it has been seen that there is a huge requirement or opportunity in making building products and featured tailored to work better for the next billion-user markets.

Source: techcrunch