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Google to bring free WiFi to Mountain View
While many municipal WiFi projects have met with failure, there's one developing that looks like it has a great chance for success. We've heard about the various projects taking place in California for wireless, and here's an update on a particularly interesting one. Google is going home and offering free WiFi to the city of Mountain View. Set to cover around 72,000 people, it's the largest city-wide WiFi project to date. Despite the fact that the city often sees over 100,000 people within its limits per day, Google is not at all concerned about bandwidth:
About 72,000 people reside in Mountain View, an 11.5-square-mile city located about 35 miles south of San Francisco. As the home to major companies like Google and VeriSign, Mountain View's daytime population can swell above 100,000. "We aren't concerned about being able to handle the load," said Chris Sacca, a Google executive who oversaw the Mountain View project. "We think we have built a pretty cool, robust network."
While the service will be offered free by Google, they won't be “cataloging” data that comes across their wires, excluding what they already track on their own sites. It would be very interesting to see how they plan on organizing and implementing this in the long run, especially when it comes to availability to regular users and future plans.
Supposedly, they'll be able to offer speeds comparable to DSL lines. which would be quite impressive if they are able to sustain it.
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User Comments (1)
Post a comment| connerwayne on August 18, 2006 2:33 AM | wow... Looks like the new Wal-Mart is sprouting up in Mountain View. Arent they at all concerned with the small businesses in the area that are almost entirely reliant upon selling ISP service? Ive wondered about the implications on small business in this arena ever since I heard that Everett, WA was going to have the countries first free wireless internet within the city limits. The implementation in Everett is supposedly going to be 1 or 2 megs, which is pretty slow, but its free. This will eliminate profits from other companies in the area such as Verizon, Comcast, Quest, and local ma and pa shops that offer dial up. The big boys in the area will still have the edge in high speed internet access, especially Verizon, who offers fiber to the premise, or FIOS, which will currently reach speeds of up to 150 Mbps (fiber technology, multiplexors, splicing techniques, etc are constantly being improved and the throughput of fiber is insane). I guess I just need to forget about corporate responsibility and just adopt the squash the little guy mentality.
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