About 400 train stations across India are going to help get millions of people online by getting Wi-Fi networks at broadband speeeds, sponsored by Google. The announcement was made by Google CEO Sundar Pichai in the occasion of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Google's U.S. headquarters. Working with Indian Railways, which operates one of the world's largest railway networks, and RailTel, which provides Internet services as RailWire via its fiber network along many of these railway lines, Google's Access & Energy team plans to bring the first stations online in the coming months. The network will expand to cover 100 of the busiest stations in India before the end of 2016, with the remaining stations following in quick succession. The service will be free to start, with the long-term goal of making it self-sustainable to allow for expansion to more stations and other places, with RailTel and more partners, in the future.

"We think this is an important part of making the Internet both accessible and useful for the more than 300 million Indians already online, and the nearly one billion more who are not," said Pichai.

To help more Indians get access to affordable smartphones, which is the primary way most people there access the Internet, Goole also launched Android One last year. To help address the challenges of limited bandwidth, the company recently launched a feature that makes mobile webpages load faster and with less data, and has made YouTube available offline with offline Maps coming soon.