Google Offers Free WiFi for Mountain View, CA

Patik writes "AFP reports that Google is offering free wifi internet access to all 70,000 residents of its headquarter's hometown, Mountain View, CA. Google expects the entire city to be covered by next June. Basic access will be free while Google retains the right to charge for premium services. This comes after Google made a bid to provide free access for all of San Francisco (pop. 744,000) two months ago, although that city is still considering the bid."

Re:What is this was Microsoft?

[HungWeiLo]

Microsoft is providing free Wifi access in Marymoor Park [metrokc.gov] in Redmond.

Re:how nice

[krray]

It all depends on how they deploy this. They may offer with their free service a NAT address (such as 169.254) via DHCP and limit your bandwidth speed. Absolutely great service for the typical user who just wants to browse the web and check their [G]Mail account.

Premium service could be a static IP address [fed from their fiber network], a 10Mbit uplink (symmetrical), primary and/or secondary DNS services, backup MX'ing, VoIP, etc. I pay $65/mo (wireless) for this exact type of service...And after comparing it to the SBC/Comcast offering(s) am more than happy to pay the "premium" for rock solid reliable service (which SBC's service is NOT).

Google has a _lot_ of room to go into the premium services with basic connectivity offered for free.

SF already has free Wi-Fi

[max born]

San Francisco has had free Wi-Fi [archive.org] for quite some time. I had the pleasure of meeting Ralf Muehlen, one of the primary contributors, when I donated equipment to the project last year.

What's interesting is that there's no reason why a lot of Internet access shouldn't be free. We don't pay a service charge for broadcast radio and television. There's an argument that Wi-Fi should be more like HAM radio -- you buy your equipment and your're online. Developments in mesh networking, especially where it's possible to relay through multiple nodes could help make this a reality. Of course we'd still need the wired backbone.

Of course there are a lot of special interests working against this. Not least, the FCC (backed by the current fee based providers) who are adamant about keeping power limititation extremely low for the ISM unlicensed spectrum. Of course the cell phone compainies have no problem blasting at thousands of times more power than we can. But that's life in politics I guess.

Be interesting to see how this plays out in the next few years, especially with the advent on 802.16.

Please get in touch with someone from sflan if you can contribute bandwidth, equipment, or technical expertise. It's a really good cause.

Re:SF already has free Wi-Fi

[evilviper]

We don't pay a service charge for broadcast radio and television.

You don't because the broadcasting company has paid, instead of making you pay... With something like satellite TV/Radio, you DO pay a service charge.

There's an argument that Wi-Fi should be more like HAM radio -- you buy your equipment and your're online.

Ham radio works because the very low-bandwidth signals can be transmitted across the globe without any infrastructure.

For the internet, someone will have to pay. That mean's everyone's tax dollars. You'll still be paying for the internet, and people who don't use the internet will also be paying for it. Everyone gets the same crappy level of service, and those who max out their connection constantly still only pay as much as those who never use it at all.

Inexpensive wireless technologies promise to make internet access faster and much, much cheaper... but not free.

Palo Alto

[idlake]

Note that in Palo Alto, you can get free wireless access courtesy of a community wireless mesh network, pafree.net (you can guess what their URL is).