Russian Railways has equipped 216 train stations with Wi-Fi service in the four last years. 80 locations were covered with wireless internet during the first half of 2019. Two more stations will get Wi-Fi by the year’s end.

The installation of the wireless internet at the train stations is being performed by two subsidiaries of Russian Railways (RZD) – Directorate of Railway Stations and Transtelecom. The companies started the project in September 2015 when the first 79 station buildings were covered with Wi-Fi. This service was extended to 57 station buildings in 2016-2018. In the future, the Directorate of Railway Stations plans to install Wi-Fi at all of its station buildings. Totally, there are 2533 station buildings in Russia while the Directorate of Railway Stations operates only 353 of them. Also, Russian Railways has 15,600 railway platforms.

Data statistics

To use the Wi-Fi service at the Russian train stations, the travellers should register. The registration is required for the first time. For future connections, mobile devices are being connected automatically. More than 1.5 million users registered during the first year after launching the service. Now, this figure includes several millions of customers. According to RZD, every minute passengers download 1 megabyte of data. The average session of the wireless connection lasts for 50 minutes. In the first half of this year, the travellers at the newly connected stations download around 53 terabytes of data.