Bad Connections Dog Google's Mountain View Wi-Fi Network

itwbennett writes "Google launched its Mountain View, CA public public Wi-Fi network in August 2006. It was one of the first public wireless Internet services in the U.S. and was intended to provide free service across the city. But in 2012, one year after Google signed a 5-year agreement to continue the service, it started a slow decline to the point of being unusable. 'We started noticing it in very large files, things like operating system updates, but now it's on files as small as 500 kilobytes,' said Rajiv Bhushan, chief scientist of pharmaceutical startup Livionex and a long-time user of the network. A recent test by IDG News Service resulted in a total failure to get a working Internet connection at a dozen sites around Mountain View, including in the city's main downtown area and directly in front of Google's headquarters." I've had disappointing results trying to connect to several other public wireless nets around the U.S., both privately sponsored and municipal. Do you know of any that work especially well?

Comments

consumer products

[fermion]

Pretty much Google's consumer products seem never to be improved or maintained. At first the consumer products were critical because this is why people like me allowed Google to set cookies, while 2o7 and the like were blocked. Of course we are now in world where tracking on the web goes beyond cookies, so maybe Google does not think it needs to provide a service beyond search to entice users.

In any case the decline of the WiFI is not surprising. It is like Google docs, now Drive, that started off as a really competitive product, but the office applications has never been updated so the features continue to lag. OpenOffice makes it look like vintage 1990.

Seriously. If MS were competent they could destroy Google with Bing and MS Windows Phone. But that is how the game works. Google does not have outrun the bear, it only has to outrun MS, which isn't that hard.