A fascinating lecture by Mr Anil Swarup (retired IAS, ex-Secretary to Govt. of India & State Govt of UP) at Lt Governer, Puducherry Raj Niwas. His Wikipedia page here and Twitter account here.
The first half is the talk itself, followed by some time of Q&A, followed by a short talk by Mr Ashwani Kumar (Chief Secretary to Government of Pondicherry) and in the end is Lt Governor Kiran Bedi.
Railtel (the telecom arm of Indian railways) is running free wifi hotspots across the country in collaboration with Google. It’s there since last two years and started with the MoU between Railtel and Google (news here) back in 2015. Fast forward to 2018 - the free wifi project railway stations seems to be doing quite well with so many users using it. The project covers 361 stations and is expected to reach it’s target of 400 stations soon. The IP network for the service is under the name “Mahataa Information India Private Limited” and originates IP pools from AS134426 - https://bgp.he.net/AS134426#_asinfo. It is a single homed network behind Railtel’s AS24186. https://qz.com/715143/googles-free-wifi-at-indian-railway-stations-is-better-than-most-of-the-countrys-paid-services/ I put an RTI to Railtel asking them about MoU details as well as bandwidth consumption for each state. In their reply, Railtel denied the request for MoU under the exemption from disclosure as well as NDAs they have with Google but they did share detailed of state wise bandwidth consumption.
Out of curiosity, I put an RTI asking President of India Secretariat about connectivity at President’s office.
Question 1: Who is the Internet service provider?
Reply: National Informatics Centre MEITY is providing internet service at President Office.
Question 2: Speed of Internet connection at President’s Office?
Reply: Presently the speed is 100 Mbps.