Google, in collaboration with RailTel, the telecom wing of the Indian Railways, will provide free Wi-Fi services to nine more railway stations across India.

The nine railway stations are: Visakhapatanam, Vijayawada, Kacheguda, Ernakulam (Junction), Pune, Raipur, Bhubaneswar, Ranchi and Bhopal.

The initiative was first started at the Mumbai Central Railway station in January.

The project is aimed at providing high-speed internet to almost 1.5 million passengers. The system offers an internet speed ranging from 30 Mbps to 50 Mbps for the first hour and 1 Mbps for the rest of the time.

According to a Manorama report, Railway minister Suresh Prabhu will formally inaugurate the services on Sunday.

The Google-RailTel collaboration will roll out the project to cover 90 stations by the end of this year and has a long-term target of 400 railway stations.  

Gulzar Azad, Google India head of access project told PTI that they are scaling up their efforts to expand the network quickly to cover some of the smaller stations where the connectivity is much more limited.