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Google Plans to Offer Free WiFi in San Francisco
jacksonwest writes "What's been rumored for some time has now been confirmed -- Google has made a bid in response to Mayor Gavin Newsom's request for information. The details of the bid include citywide access, for free, at 300kbps. The plans dovetail into their location-based advertising and services strategy, and come on the heels of their recent VPN service rollout."
WiMax isn't a replacement for WiFi.
And what does "location-based advertising and services" mean in reality? Free wifi is good, of course, but TNSTAAFL. Can I rely on my traffic not being inspected/recorded by anyone with this offer?
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
Location based Ad? Do they monitor the connections to their network. What about privacy?
The same thing is said every time Google releases a new service and I have yet to see a serious abuse from them.
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Telecom companies managed to stop MUNICIPAL wifi.
With google being a company there is no "tax payer's money" involved.
The only thing the Telecom companies can do is sue google for "dumping" their products.
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
Dupe at least not on the same page.2 4&tid=217&tid=95
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/20/12432
Could this be what NASA and Google are going to start working on?
Now that is an idea. Get NASA to launch a fleet of google satellites capable of blanketing the world in free connectivity!
"For Great Justice."
Google is, first and foremost, an advertising company. They are going to offer "service and location based" advertising with the free Wi-Fi.
This is just another service built on top of their advertising network.
Almost everything Google does is built on top of their advertising network.
What's in it for Google? A few million people being forced to see the Google Ads.
That's not a bad thing, in my opinion. A few ads for 300kbs wireless Internet connectivity in the United States? Sign me up.
Keep in mind that this is not like NetZero:
NetZero was trying to build an ISP out of Ad revenue. Google is trying to enhance their advertising network by offering an ISP.
The ISP side of Google can simply be a loss leader in order to obtain a wider understanding of their audience. Hey, it adds a ton value to AdWords, which means they can charge a premium for that service over Yahoo! or MSN, and still remain a dominant force in that market.
If they roll this out nation-wide, this is going to make Google a ton of money.
There's nothing wrong with selling a product below the cost of producing it, Microsoft's Xbox and Sony's Playstation 2 are or have been selling below production cost since their first release. I guess the question is, would that change if they said it was free. Technically people won't be getting it for free though, as they'll be subjected to ads or whatnot.
This will kill all the little mom and pops wifi offerrings. Alot of them have thrived by being creative (ie. free access for foot traffic) but this will surely change things.
It's selling products below the cost of producing them in order to drive out competition. As others noted, selling a product below cost in order to make high profits on accessory items is not necessarily dumping.
It's adware.
;)
Not theat the press ever gets anything right
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
Plus, if they do it well enough, Google may eventually be able to go to cities and ask them how much they'd like to contribute from their municipal budget to Google's infrastructure expenses for the privilege of having the city Googlified. For cities too stingy to get with it, shame and embarrassment would beckon. I'm sure very reasonable rates could be agreed, far lower than their counterparts might have to pay in er ahem Palermo, Sicily, for example.
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Its soo nice to see human compassion here...your first priority is to get homeless people out of your view? Not education. Not cheap and reliable health care. Not better, effective and more efficient policing methods. Real estate development that is not damaging to the existing residents, environment, and beneficial to more than just the few. No...your first priority for your public official is all about you. And what you see. WHich is not to say you're any different from any others in America. Not that I am saying that this GOogle free wifi deal with the city of SF was meant to rectify or solve any of the things that are more important issues facing SF and any city. But it has an apparent beneficial result regardless...maybe. It could and probably would allow more people access to information. What they do withthat information...is a guess better answerd by someone who totally understands the power of information and access to it on a society. It may drive prices down for related and competing services or force them to offer a much more compelling package than they do now. Which in turn will get more people online. WHich may have an effect and may not in the city. Its just I can't shake the sense of deja vu of people complaining that electricity really had nothing to offer to improve their real lives and was just a novelty. Which was true for awhile. But look at us now. Without access to electricity in today's society, you are definitely (for the most part) disadvantaged from the start. So in my eyes...I will be judging this cautiously as a good thing. The cities I think that get internet access to the level of electricity or water the earliest I believe will be in better shape years from now.
I highly doubt that users will get as much of a real Internet connection with these new free wifi services as they do with home DSL or cable service. Modern broadband service in the USA provides you with an Internet routable IP address that you can run server applications on any port of. The power of broadband has allowed p2p to prosper among average users, and has let any slashdotter in their parent's basement host their own SSH, FTP, HTTP, IRC, and etc, servers.
Unfortunately...most users wouldn't care if they couldn't do this anymore. If they can get free wifi that goes through NAT to get to the Internet, they'll use it, and the market for real Internet connections will disappear. Ubiquitous free wifi would be great for a centralized content provider like google, but would effectively destroy the market for cheap symmetric* Internet connections. The "power user" market will be too small to keep DSL companies in business. Small businesses and individuals will have to outsource their hosting to giant colo facilities even if they have the hardware and know how to run their own servers. This could potentially be a real threat to democracy on the Internet.
Most users want the net to be more like television: a multimedia service that turns individuals into passive media consumers and that only allows corporations to be content producers. The new Internet will provide consumers with more services then TV does. However, without any cheap and easy decentralized distribution method, the set of service providers will be restricted to those who can afford high bandwidth connections. This could be a great loss of potential information and services for consumers, and moreover would be a restriction of freedom for those who wish to be content providers.
Wireless networking could lead to the further decentralization of the Internet. Cooperative or personal wifi projects are helping us move in that direction. A centralized service like google wifi would mean going backwards.
*Data will still be able to travel in both directions of course, but other Internet users would not be able to initiate connections with the free wifi hosts, thus forcing the wifi users to only run clients, not servers.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.