RailWire Wi-Fi by RailTel is now live at 1600 railway stations across the country, with Santacruz railway station in Mumbai becoming the 1600th station to become a RailWire Wi-Fi zone, the Western Railway said Wednesday.

RailTel Corporation, a "Mini Ratna (category-I)" PSU, is one of the largest neutral telecom infrastructure providers in the country owning a pan-India optic fibre network on exclusive Right of Way (ROW) along Railway track.

RailWire is a retail Broadband initiative of the RailTel, which envisages extending broadband and application services to the public.

"In order to fulfil the promise of bringing fast and free Wi-Fi at all stations (except the halt stations) within a year, team RailTel is tirelessly working to achieve the target and in this process, WR's Santacruz station became the 1600th railway station of the Indian Railway which has now been equipped with RailWire Wi-Fi connectivity," the WR said in a statement.

WR CPRO (Chief Public Relations Officer) Ravinder Bhakar said Reay Road station of the Central Railway became the 1000th station to be covered under free wi-fi facility two days back.

"Now Santacruz station has become the 1600th station in the country to have fast free RailWire Wi-Fi," he said.

RailTel CMD Puneet Chawla termed the development as an outstanding achievement.

"RailTel has provided high speed Wi-Fi at 985 stations with own/other funding and at 415 A, A1 and C category stations, associating Google as the technology partner for radio access, while using the RailTel backbone for broadband connectivity. RailTel has also completed work of providing Wi-Fi to 200 stations with support of Universal Service Obligatory Fund of GoI," Chawla said.

RailTel started providing the free public Wi-Fi service at Indian railway stations with a vision of turning Railway stations into a platform for digital inclusion. The idea behind providing free Wi-Fi to these very small stations catering to mainly rural/low population density areas is to provide the people with state of the art Wi-Fi facility.

Explaining the modalities of using Wi-Fi network, the statement said the user has to switch on the Wi-Fi mode in the smartphone and select the RailWire Wi-Fi network.

"After the RailWire homepage network automatically appears on the smartphone, the user has to enter his or her mobile number on this homepage. The user will get one-time password (OTP) in form of SMS in the message box which has to be entered in the home page of RailWire. After entering OTP, users will be able to access high speed internet and can start browsing," it stated.