Google Station

~ the obituary ~

google station was free public wifi you connected to in a train station, and mostly it was an indian product. the first stations came online with railtel and indian railways around 2015 and 2016, starting at mumbai central and spreading down the line. i read about it the way you read about infrastructure in another country, as a number in a tech article. turkey was not on the map for this, and honestly it did not need to be.

the idea was decent. put a fast, free access point where a lot of people wait with nothing to do, let google handle the hard parts and let a local partner run the wires. by mid-2018 it had passed four hundred stations in india, ahead of the original target, and google had taken the same model into indonesia and a handful of other emerging markets. for a while it looked like the way the next billion people would get online for the first time.

by the time google announced it was winding station down, in february 2020, the reason was almost boring. mobile data had gotten cheap. in turkey i had gone from a 33.6k modem to home broadband years earlier, and the countries station served were making the same jump on their phones, just faster and without the wire. when the data in your pocket costs almost nothing, free wifi you have to stand near stops being a reason to stand there.

~ the case file ~

~ how it landed ~

railtel kept the indian stations running after google left, so the wifi at those four-hundred-plus stations did not actually go dark. what died was google's involvement and the global brand around it. that is a gentler ending than most things here get, the plumbing outlived the company that designed it.

~ how it actually ended ~

google framed it as a scaling problem, and it was one. every country brought its own partners and its own rules about who was even allowed to offer public internet, and stitching that together did not get cheaper with size the way software usually does. so google folded the effort into its broader next billion users work and let station itself go. the need it was built for did not disappear, it just moved onto the cellular network where google was not the one paying for it.

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