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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."
Just wait till the Bay Area wireless comes online and that poll choice will make the others pale into insignificance.
Modest doubt is called the beacon of the wise. - William Shakespeare
yeah, i'll probably be mod'd troll or whatever,
but why is google doing this?
(what are their secret motives?)
i rtfa, and all i found was: "Under the terms of the deal, the basic wireless internet access would be free, but Google could charge users fees for premium services."
so why would google spend so much money to provide this with possibly/probably little return?
Don't forget, your European HQ is in Dublin, Ireland. Can we have free Wifi too please?
You could say it's about advertisements. After all, the more people on the Internet, the more people searching Google, so the more money they make, right?
But there's another side, and depending on how they do it, it could either be interesting or scary. I'm betting on the Interesting, but -
With this service, Google will be able to track where everyone in this service goes, and then sell that data to others. Odds are, this would be like Tivo does it: track trends and report anonymous information. So if someone wants to figure out that people who watch "Monster Garage" also watch a lot of "Veronica Mars", they can throw up some he-man car adds on the later show to try and capture those eyeballs.
In the same way, Google could sell anonymous research data to other firms. Something like "people who tend to visit Slashdot also tend to visit digg.com, news.google.com, etc". They don't have to give out individual "this person searched for this", but just trends - even searchable trends, like saying "these web sites reported on this item, and here's what the breakdown of those people who went to that site or searched for that item visited".
Far more effective than the questionaires of "what computer gaming sites do you visit?". With Google providing the access, they can just tell the marketers directly.
Anyway, this is just my opinion. I could be wrong.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
When I first saw this, I thought "gee, Google's providing free net access - good for them". If this had been Microsoft, I would have been more likely to think "damn Microsoft - instant monopoly. Bastards". I actually didn't think about that until an earlier poster mentioned MS above.
;)
Whatever you feel about MS/Google, its interesting to see how having a "don't be evil" rather than a "make lotsa money quick" mantra from the outset colours people's view of any plans you put forward in later years.
Or maybe I'm just easily brainwashed, who knows
How can google profit from this venture? The article doesn't say what kind of "premium services" they are going to charge for, but I wouldn't see what services the average google-wifi user will pay for that the non-google wifi user won't.
"but Google could charge users fees for premium services." and what would these consist of ... I mean you either have free web access or not, hard to see what their going to charge for unless they cut off basic services that people need (ie: browsing off google related sites) . their going to have to start finding ways to profit from other things to justify their share price, they cant stay fully reliant on adsense so it should be interesting to see how they profit from this.
rabble rabble rabble!
/. it isn't for ISPs, coders outsourced, etc...
dem Google took r isp!
funny how it is ok for the music industry to die because it has an antiquated model but on
Other providers in the area don't even have dial up at a flat rate price. It's all dial up you pay for by the hour. Through a combination of Wi-Fi and IP over Powerlines, I'd love to see Google offer basic connectivity to the nation. Talk about not being evil! Then let google, the cable companies, and phone companies offer fiber to the home for those willing to pay for even more speed. It might be nice to see some actual broadband connections in the United States. Other countries are way ahead of us here!
BAH! You get warmth all year round, that has to count for something. It's getting towards "freeze your ass off" season here in the Northeast and real Spring won't come until April.
Be grateful you live in God's Ashtray.
San Francisco has had free Wi-Fi 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.
Microsoft Offers Free Wi-FI to Redmond, Wa
Pfft. That's nothing; some nice people called "Linksys" already offer free unregulated wireless broadband in *any* large conurbation. Don't believe me? Just turn on your laptop wherever you go and I guarantee you there'll be an open access point with the SID "Linksys".
Lovely people.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
This will be a good thing for community relations. Some companies sponsor the local sports clubs or arts groups. This is another way.
It's also on slashdot, NBC, Yahoo and all sorts, giving lots of PR.
It might also yield some results as a social experiment.
All this for what cost? Bandwidth for 70,000 people and setting up a few hundred hotspots. Maybe a million bucks a year? Sounds like a good deal to me.
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).
funny how it is ok for the music industry to die because it has an antiquated model but on /. it isn't for ISPs, coders outsourced, etc...
Insightful? And the parent as troll? That hardly seems fair. The parent wasn't trolling. The parent was pointing out a very ligitimate fact -- it sucks to be an ISP in that town. How the hell is that trolling? Would it be trolling if some company started handing out all the free food you could eat and I said "sucks to be Wegman's in that town"?
In any case I would have a very hard time using this "free" service. Given Google's privacy policies and the fact that they warehouse data forever would you really trust them with your Internet access? Newsflash: They can announce "don't be evil" all they want but they are in the business of making money.
Besides which, my ISP (Verizon) gained my everlasting respect when they refused to sell out a customer to RIAA. Think Google with their "we'll hand over any information if we are subpenoaed" would have fought that fight?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I could see MS being frightened of this if free WiFi access becomes widespread, and for good reason. If WiFi becomes nearly universally available, then web-based apps for things other than email access will be truly practical as replacements for and competitors to locally-installed apps. (Think of an ultra-cheap subscription-based or free Google-hosted OpenOfficeOnline over universally free broadband vs. locally-installed MS Office.)
Google already has some good experience in this. Just take a look at Google Earth, which has a small local component that combines with a silky-smooth connection to Google's data. The thing is a just beautiful replacement for locally-installed mapping software (such as MS Streets and Trips). In general, online mapping software is pretty good. The only thing that really keeps people buying locally-installed map software is that they may need it when there's no web connection available. Make WiFi universally available, and that factor is a thing of the past. -- Paul
OpenSource.MathCancer.org: open source comp bio
I live in San Francisco, and not a day goes by that I don't see a cackling criminal hellbent on destruction, twirling his mustache, about to cause untold carnage with a firearm, only to be thwarted by a civilian carrying a legal, licensed handgun. It's truly a sight to behold. The only thing keeping San Francisco from turning into Lagos is the vast handgun toting populace, not the police, not the legal system. And now we've gone ahead and ruined it.
It'll be just like the veritable river of blood that is...London, England.
Disclaimer: I voted against the handgun ban, but give me a break.
Hey, I don't know about the rest of you but Google's just about got all my info pegged down. Gmail stores my records, I'm always logged in so my search history is right there. With google home page they have the weather of the town I live in, my favorite news feeds and they know I like the vocabulary word of the day front and center. My bookmarks section is minimalist, but most telling are links to other free email accounts. They know who my contacts are, they know who I invite to gmail.
Has it ever occured to anyone that gmail is the most comprehensive (I think "pay for" MSN gives you three total addresses) email account that by nature gathers statistical relationship information on the users at SIGNUP. Gmail's signup record is a complete model of that whole six degrees of seperation theory. As it is, when I google Pr0n I Log the f*ck out; I have to; my search history is used for my search results. I use my Google home page at school (college) I do not want to get kicked out of a lab for Googling fsck. Most importantly I do not want pr0n based ads showing up everywhere. I have kids remember.
With free internet service provided by Google I would be totally on record no ifs, ands, or buts about it; they would be able to say "hey this guy doesn't like Pr0n showing up on his search history, lives in (insert town, state, and address here), must have had a divorce last year, oh there it is his lawyer's email is xxxx@gmail.com, is a student, has kids, frequently uses google for spelling help (determined by a misspelled word searched and no results clicked, common search pattern -posts online a bit maybe), and many other things I can't even fathom,etc...".
I love google they do a great job but it's a corporation, corporations are notorious for screwing people when they can, a corporation is a business entity that is held accountable for people's actions, that business entity is by nature psychopathic. I find this service wraps up google's statistical sources and Google seems intent on KEEPING their information FOREVER, so long as they can legally get away with it. I know the terms of gmail when I signed up, and I know how to avoid what I don't want. I like it that way.
Under the influence of Post-Cyberpunk Gonzo Journalism
I haven't been keeping up with new technologies, so here are some naive questions:
1. Is it possible for more than one WiFi router to cover a given hotspot?
2. If so, how would the client choose which router to use?
3. How many routers could occupy a hotspot before service is seriously harmed?
I'm wondering about the implications of Google offering free WiFi service along with a paid premium service. Would a different provider be able to provide competing services for the same area?
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Having a little bit of Deja Vu here, as I seem to remember hearing about something like this quite some time ago.
With a little digging, I found this: https://wifi.google.com/download.html
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
I live in Mountain View, so I'm very interested to see what the offering will hold. I'll also be interested to see how wireless network access holds up on a large scale deployment with lots of users. Sharing a wireless network in a household with one to six people is easy. But, when I'm trying to access Google's wireless network along with all of my neighbors, will it withstand the load?
Google has huge bandwidth to their corporate site.. What kind of bandwidth will the wifi network have on the backend? It could be very interesting if the 802.11G wifi has a big pipe servicing it, then it becomes more attractive than my existing 3+Mbps cable service.