New Delhi (Metro Rail News): Commuters travelling by Delhi Metro will soon be able to enjoy free Wi-Fi not only at the stations, but even on moving trains. The six stations of the Airport Express Line were the first to provide the facility in 2016, and Delhi Metro Rail Corporation will start free Wi-Fi services in moving trains on the same corridor around end-2019.
The mechanism through which commuters will be able to access Wi-Fi onboard moving trains is a two-level network. The official explained that, “It is a train-to-tunnel (T2T) radio network that passes signal from base stations inside a tunnel to portable base stations inside head cars. The inner-train network then transmits the signal from the Wireless Access Points (WAP) in each car to the users’ devices.”
A DMRC official said, “The Wi-Fi service in Delhi Metro will be provided for free and without limitations on download speed or traffic volume. The target speed will reach up to 300 Mbps per train.” A DMRC official working on the project said that, “At the moment, the download speed for a certain user depends on the network load at the time.”
The official added that DMRC is planning to deploy a Wi-Fi network on all its corridors, except the Magenta (Janakpuri West-Botanical Garden) and Pink (Majlis Park-Shiv Vihar) Lines. Like the Airport Express Line, free Wi-Fi would be provided both at stations and in trains on all the corridors except these two lines. After the Airport Express Line, in 2017 the Blue Line (Dwarka-Noida City Centre/Vaishali) was the second corridor to provide free Wi-Fi facility to passengers at its 50 stations.
While Airport Express Line will start providing Wi-Fi facility inside moving trains by the end of this year, the Yellow Line (Samaypur Badli-HUDA City Centre) is expected to get Wi-Fi facility installed at all its stations by the end of this year.
Blue Line is the busiest corridor of the Delhi Metro network, it started providing Wi-Fi facility two years ago and uses a facility named “Oui DMRC Free Wi-Fi” at the the 50 stations of the service. Commuters can log in by searching for the Wi-Fi options on their devices and choose “Oui DMRC Free Wi-Fi” after a one-time registration through their mobile phones.
To provide its passengers with free access to the internet, DMRC had tied up with a consortium led by M/s Techno Sat Comm, which has been providing the same amenity at the six stations of the Airport Express Line from October 2016. Techno Sat also run India’s first Wi-Fi on a train service, the Delhi-Howrah Rajdhani Express.
