Google said on Monday that it is winding down its Station program, as part of which it worked with a number of other partners to roll out free Wi-Fi in more than 400 railway stations in India and in several other public places around the globe.
Caesar Sengupta, VP of Payments and Next Billion Users at Google, said the program, launched in 2015, helped millions of users connect to the internet everyday — many for the first time. But as mobile data prices got cheaper in many markets, Google Station was no longer as necessary, he said.
Sengupta said it had also become difficult for Google to scale Station program in a sustainable fashion. Google worked with a number of players to enable free Wi-Fi to users in public places. In India, for instance, Google built the software stack while RailTel, a state-owned telecom infrastructure provider, delivers the free internet access.
RailTel delivers Wi-Fi in more than 5,600 railway stations and over the years has 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,” said Gupta.
“The challenge of varying technical requirements and infrastructure among our partners across countries has also made it difficult for Station to scale and be sustainable, especially for our partners. And when we evaluate where we can truly make an impact in the future, we see greater need and bigger opportunities in making building products and features tailored to work better for the next billion user markets,” Sengupta said.
The company will be winding down Station globally this year.
In recent years, Google explored monetization models for Google Station. The company began showing an ad when a user signed in to connect to its internet service.
More to follow…
