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The Internet Businesses Google

Google's Free Wifi is Becoming a Way of Life in India (qz.com) 35

Sushma U N, writing for Quartz: American internet search giant Google has completed the rollout of one of the world's biggest public wifi projects in India. On June 07, Google said it now offers free high-speed public wifi at 400 railway stations in Asia's third-largest economy, in partnership with the government-owned Indian Railways and RailTel, which operates a fibre network along the country's massive network of train tracks. The company had announced the initiative back in 2015 during prime minister Narendra Modi's visit to its headquarters in Mountain View, California. The Mumbai Central station in India's financial capital was the first to get the facility in January 2016. Now, over 8 million people use the service, Google said in a blog post. "On average, people consume 350MB of data per session, roughly the size of a half-hour television episode, and over half of the people using Google Station engage in multiple online sessions a day," the company said.
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Google's Free Wifi is Becoming a Way of Life in India

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  • Uh oh. (Score:5, Funny)

    by ColdWetDog ( 752185 ) on Friday June 08, 2018 @11:01AM (#56750230) Homepage

    Hey guys, this IS Google. Don't get too attached to this service.

    And, for all that is holy, don't let it come out of beta.

    • Hey guys, this IS Google. Don't get too attached to this service.

      Google is paying a price for their engineering cycle of "build-deprecate-kill". They are suffering from employee attrition, as developers realize that nothing they do will ever get out of beta.

      Attrition is especially severe at the Waymo subsidiary. Waymo is ahead on the tech, but there are no path to an actual product, so engineers are jumping ship to Uber and elsewhere.

  • by Kenja ( 541830 ) on Friday June 08, 2018 @11:02AM (#56750236)
    Then you start exerting control. It's how drug dealing works.
  • ..meanwhile, Google is slurping up all the delicious free data all those people are providing, bundling it, and selling it off to the highest bidder -- and likely their primary customer is the Indian government.
  • by Type44Q ( 1233630 ) on Friday June 08, 2018 @11:17AM (#56750362)

    If you're being spied on by Mr. "Don't Not Be Evil" Schmidt, it's not free.

    • I've always used the internet, telephone or any service where data is out of my direct control figuring that I could be spied upon.

      This has been true even in the days before the internet.
      If during the 1970's or 1980's I went grocery shopping. Being a reoccurring customer, I could spark interest if I had changed my shopping habits. Private Investigators would watch peoples shopping habits dig in their trash to find clues on what they are investing.

One good reason why computers can do more work than people is that they never have to stop and answer the phone.

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