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Google Partners with Earthlink in Municipal Wi-Fi
tsalaroth writes "lightreading.com has an interesting article regarding the San Francisco Wi-Fi bids. Apparently, Google and Earthlink bid separately for building the municiple Wi-Fi, but have now joined forces. From the article: 'In this proposal, Google will provide a free WiFi service citywide and EarthLink will serve as the premium service provider.'"
And what we have to make us feel safe is that they have a catchy marketing phrase of not being evil which they've already bypassed then played semantic justification games about later.
What could possibly go wrong from here?
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Makes monitoring a real headache. All us citizen-suspects will be tougher to keep tabs on.
Faith: n. -- That human impulse that drives them to steal appliances when the power goes out
What with their tracking and profiling from your searches and clicks.
And now they will have you by the shorthairs when they are your ISP.
The tracking details they will have are only dreamt of by Poindexter and his fanclub.
* Google is strengthening their partnership with VA Software Corp. Secret talks about changing the name of Slashdot to SlashGoogledot.
Spelling tip: just remember, the municipal is your pal.
Those guys were pretty kooky in the late 90's when they starting snatching up companies like Mindspring, poor Mindspring.
An Education is the Font of All Liberty
Free internet access has already been shown to be a dud model. Think back a few years and you may recall a whole host of free internet providers who were going to make up the dollars with advertising. Do you remember any names? Probably not, they all went broke or changed direction.
/that/ far from a wired point) than have to put up with adds. And if I'm going to pay, it has to have good geographical coverage, which is not that easy or cheap to do once you start looking at all the blind spots from irregular terrain or tall building in city centres. I'm sceptical about the advertisement value being greater than the cost of provision, though google must think so. I'll be interested to see if this has any legs in the long term.
So what's new with wireless? Not much. I for one would rather pay for add free wireless access (but not much- I'm never
I was under the impression there was already a free Google hot spot in Union Square no?
This does seem like the ideal situation for Google to provide "free" WiFi with AdSense to all of San Francisco. It will be interesting to see how this develops in other major cities.
All traffic still goes thru the routers, so can be monitored with ease if need be.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Lay off of Google once in a while. They're agreeing to provide free wi-fi to a city. I know that everyone loves to trounce on anything that's big, but big companies are not always bad things. I frankly don't care if google handles all of my internet capabilities, because I trust them to do the right thing, and so far thay haven't proven me wrong. If we're still complaining about their decision in china, I think they did the right thing. They have clearly labeled warnings if chinese denizens search for something that's censored, and at least they have some freedom. What if Google was cut out entirely in China, and the only search engines that worked were something that's 100% government friendly? I'm not saying you have to like everything Google has done, but they have on multiple occaisions stood up for our privacy where other's have buckled, and until they decide to change that (which I don't think will happen unless there's a complete sweep of the Board of Directors), I will happily consume their goods and services.
I am a viral sig. Please copy me and help me spread. Thank you.
Municipal is spelled Municipal, if you are going to try and be a Grammar Nazi then you should learn how to either spell, pick up a dictionary, use spell check yourself, or ask somebody, hell, anybody, because at least they'd be smarter than you. Geez trying to dog on the writer and you can't even get that right.
Now, to bring my comments back on subject since that's why comments exist. I can see why this would be a good step for Earthlink, they're a dying company, sure, people still use dial up, but other than that, are there that many people who still live in a box when connecting with high speed, or would want to. I read the article and I see that Earthlink is going to be the premier ISP, I guess this is Google's way of avoiding becoming yet another ISP, really I just wanted to bust out Cisco Kid for not knowing how to spell and trying to slam the writer for not spelling right even though he did. Yeah, I have the same problem, but you know what, I don't really care, if you don't know what you're talking about then STFU.
... to be an info terrorist. I will drop thought bombs on the world and when they read them, they will be like "OMG someone just thought bombed me, oh the terror!"
And because of that evil google, the authorities won't be able to track down and prosecute the info terrorists. What kind of sick world are we living in? And why do those who support this move by google hate America?
This is a good idea, because the free market has not yet managed to bring cheap and plentiful bandwidth to the masses. / sarcasm. // have been to philadelphia a few times. the wifi competitors have nothing to fear from "municipal wifi." Only taxpayers do, given how expensive it is to provide such crap quality service. /// won't somebody think of the children!
"What could possibly go wrong from here?"
Google's networked systems achieve consciousness on 10th June at 7pm GMT... blah blah blah we've all seen the results of that... Gotta be stopped... Who wants the mini-gun?
Deleted
Google with their egalitarian stance on how the internet should benefit every human on the planet + the ISP that guarantees no spam and employs geeks, elves, leprechauns, gnomes (oh wait... that's Travelocity), unicorns and pretty office women! The earth is saved! Now if they can get Bush out of office next election, then we'll know that the world is finally on the right track again.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Here in Pittsburgh, Earthlink ate the larger ISP, Stargate. Now there are three total players: Comcast, Verizon, and Earthlink.
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
Very wise post.
Do not think.
Trust your big daddy.
Let big daddy do the thinking for you.
In this case bid daddy is an advertisement broker/spyware company, which does services like search, e-mail, and now wifi to serve ads and gather info at the same time.
So, oi guys, let's never lay off of Google, and always keep thinking ourselves. Really.
Like broadcast TV and radio which advertising subsizes %100, ads on access points, or browser controlled imbebed content, may ultimately pay for our Internet access.
If the FCC were to set aside some long range frequencies for this, non drop-off (wavelength/2*pi) , and with compensatory multiplexing, decent collision avoidance, meshing, etc. there could be a new growth and a different(?) kind of Internet where the old landline ISPs are secondary to Wi-Fi.
---- (wavelength/2*pi) is called the skin depth. See Griffin, Intro to Electrodynamics, 2nd ed. Another reasonable source for this stuff is the O'Reilly 802 Wi-Fi book. ---- Lights up hemp and inhales.
You forget that they're supposedly trying to not be evil. Also, as a note about wardriving, Google seems to be less interested in that type of technique due to privacy concerns. However, if that changes, I am available for work in that arena =_)
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I thought the pricipal was your pal...
That is the question.
The whole purpose of muni WIFI/FTTH is about LOW PRICE.
Letting ISPs get into the act only will raise prices and defeat original purpose.
What the hell is wrong with outsourcing? You got something against the free market that has led to our current high standard of living? You want someone's job to be preserved despite how inefficient and costly doing so might be?
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
Somehow I thought Google was the added-content provider (ya know, with the search engine and all) -- and Earthlink was an ISP. Silly me...
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Will they ever manage to finish this project, or will it remain in a half broken for eternity?
could destroy network neutrality. If I'm worried about anyone messing with the Internet it's the telco gang of rent-seeking thugs bringing an imperialist caste system to a great freewheeling experiment in international democracy, all for the sake of a quick buck.
If it's between the geeks and the telcos, I choose the geeks.
Q: What did the comedian say to the crowd?
A: If I knew, this joke would be funny.
to DEADBEEFBABE?
besides, MAC addresses are stopped at the first router
I was having a discussion with a friend last week about muni wi-fi and its practicality. I said that I thought it was a pink elephant, and outlined the following reasons. The assumption based on these points, of course, is that you are trying to blanket the entire municipality with WiFi service, which comes with the potential for a lot of people jumping on.
Shared fabric - Like hubs in the days of old, a WiFi AP can only move as much combined data per second as the number on it.
Half duplex - Bandwidth is further limited as WiFi radios typically can only either listen or broadcast at any given time. I _have_heard whispers about prototype chips out there that can do full duplex, but I'm not aware of what products, if any, use them.
Limited range - The ISM band is very limited as far as how much power you are allowed to output. Most laptops and WiFi PCMCIA cards only have a broadcast power of about 30-100mW. At the top end you'd be lucky to get service past 500 feet with a standard dipole. Yes, you can use an external antenna, but that's impractical for laptop users and requires professional installation for desktop users.
Now add up all of these three factors - Because you have limited bandwidth, you must install a lot of APs to make sure your service doesn't grind to a halt. This is doubly so becuase the idea is to have a blanket of coverage. But there is another problem - If you have that many APs, you will need a wired connection for each one of them. You can uplink them to a main site, yes - But line of sight is a factor there, as is radio spectrum - If you have dozens of installations trying to talk to a main site, there is a big problem because WiFi only has 3 channels (1, 6, and 11) to pick from that don't interfere with each other in any way, which means your bandwidth will tank because of transmission collisions.
To get around this, you could uplink your APs serially, but then the problem is that the users at the last AP in the line will be contesting for bandwidth with the users of every AP after it, all the way up to the network access point.
In conclusion - While WiFi has a lot of great applications, city-wide Internet access isn't one of them. IMHO, the future of wireless Internet access likely lies with cell providers, who have paid for their (large) piece of the spectrum and are allowed to broadcast with a lot more radio power than ISM ever will. I'm already seeing this going on in EVDO.
-R
Rumor: Earthlink and Scientology own a block in New York and their buildings, back to back, have Seekrit Passages for world domination.
....
Fact, last time I heard it: Earthlink routinely provides your password to its help desk people.
Figures Google would be borged early. Once absorbed, I wonder, will they call it Eargle? Goothlink?
Anyway, no surprise they're going to try the total control-brain parasite routine in SF first, because if the experiment in total control fails, they'll just earthquake the city and hide the evidence, eh?
Install the Diebold machines, install the WiFi, let's see how SF votes in the next election. It may be the future for all of us
Here in Cupertino, with free Metro-Fi, the network is only usable around after midnight. Other time, the speed is worse than you 1200 baud or 300 baud modem.
As for 500 feet range, I found that using a 802.11g or 802.11g MIMO can pick the Metro-Fi more than 1000 feet away.
Metro-Fi needs to update the speed - or link directly to Yahoo and Google (Metro-Guys, Yahoo and Google is just down the street)
Using WiFi equipment for metro networking seems like a stupid idea to me given the limited range of the equipment. I think Google is making a bad decision hear since there are a number of competing technologies either available or in the works that can do metro wireless far more effectively. WiFi was meant for local area network.
Vote for Pedro
The sad part is, I normally correct others on their spelling of such words.
mmm..
This is good foot.
*Earhtlink support and billing hell* ... *Cringe*
I won't use it.
-O-_-O-
-Fiend-