8/23/2006
Free Google WiFi Internet
Thanks to Google, residents in Mountain View, California have one less monthly bill to pay every month... their Internet.In August 2006, Google launched their free wireless Internet service called Google WiFi Mountain View. The service is completely free to the 72,000 residents of Mountain View and is not supported via ads. It covers the 12 square mile radius of the town and is comprised of some 380 access points.
Speeds have been reported at 1Mbps and Google is hoping that their product will convince many residents to drop their DSL & Cable offerings. Although these speeds aren't super fast, Google's free alternative will be something that most people will embrace. People who still want their high speed connections will have to pay for it.
If you're not in Mountain View don't despair, Google has teamed up with Earthlink for a more ambitious project - providing wireless Internet service to the San Francisco area. The San Francisco service will be a little different from the one now available in Mountain View in that it will be tiered. The free service (300 Kbps) will be supported by ads. If you want higher speeds (1 Mbps) without the ads, then you will have to pay monthly subscription fee.
So what is Google really up to here? Is Mountain View and San Francisco just beta cities for something much bigger like national WiFi? Google has been quietly buying up miles of "dark fiber" across the United States for years. Add that fiber network to the Wimax routers and chip sets slated to hit the consumer market next year and Google could wipe out the telecom and cable companies before they knew what hit them. Think about it... Google could instantly become a national ISP, phone (VoIP) and TV provider for the entire country.It sounds easy, but consider the deployment difficulties of a national wireless network. A single WiFi base station can only cover a limited area. With overlap you are probably talking about 300-500 base stations per square mile depending on terrain. I'm no math major, but how many base stations would Google need to cover the entire United States? Over a billion? If Google did decide to build a national network, they'd probably have to hire all those former cable and DSL employees just to repair and maintain this massive network.
A national WiFi network isn't exactly an unobtainable goal. SingTel, Asia's largest multimarket mobile operator, estimates that the entire island nation of Singapore will boast of countrywide Wi-Fi coverage before the end of 2006.
National WiFi domination... something to think about.
Sources: Techie Diva, News.com
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Just look to big blue to see how large corporate entities can fall when they are in a position where it takes 40 people to make one decision.
If Google is to make muni-wifi available they will need some strategic partenerships with other companies.
If Google is to make muni-wifi available they will need some strategic partenerships with other companies.
[*] posted by 
: August 23, 2006 4:29 PM
: August 23, 2006 4:29 PM
Interesting article. It clarified nicely the terms of availability as they exist (or will exist) in both the SFO and MV locales. But I tell you what. It would be refreshing to read, even if only once, an article that actually refers to an verifiable source supporting the claims that Google is gobbling up dark fiber like it was going out of style, other than the January 2005 report cited and the now famous Cringely newsletter account. Every time I read those citations I’m reminded of weapons of mass destruction.
Any company with enough money can purchase a limited number of wavelengths or even dark strands of fiber and keep it a secret. But no one can buy up a supply of dark fiber that would be large enough to constitute national coverage for every city, town, village and hamlet and keep “that” a secret. Not with human nature being what it is, even if the company doing it is Google.
The dark fiber that is being acquired is for its internal backbone purposes. Google is not about to bring wireline facilities into every potential WiFi hot spot or hot zone. It is buying up optical capacity along the nation's rights of way, which does very little to directly support WiFi distribution networks to within the last 100 meters of homes (equivalent feeder and distribution plant) or access- and metro- area aggregation offices that accept backhaul from the deepest parts of the network.
Yes, the company is buying up optical transmission assets of all types - dark, lit and wavelengths - in support of its own enterprise and utility networks. It has no desire to compete for dumb transport in the access and metro spaces when existing service providers are more than capable of handling that part of the equation for them. And those destinations include residential areas, industrial parks and SMB zones where they wish to site and future WiFi access points, as well.
If and when the company throws off signs that it is actually engaged in cornering the market on dark fiber – which is what it would take to match what has been claimed – I should like to be the first to acknowledge it and report what I know. Til then? They’re just taking care of business.
Frank
Any company with enough money can purchase a limited number of wavelengths or even dark strands of fiber and keep it a secret. But no one can buy up a supply of dark fiber that would be large enough to constitute national coverage for every city, town, village and hamlet and keep “that” a secret. Not with human nature being what it is, even if the company doing it is Google.
The dark fiber that is being acquired is for its internal backbone purposes. Google is not about to bring wireline facilities into every potential WiFi hot spot or hot zone. It is buying up optical capacity along the nation's rights of way, which does very little to directly support WiFi distribution networks to within the last 100 meters of homes (equivalent feeder and distribution plant) or access- and metro- area aggregation offices that accept backhaul from the deepest parts of the network.
Yes, the company is buying up optical transmission assets of all types - dark, lit and wavelengths - in support of its own enterprise and utility networks. It has no desire to compete for dumb transport in the access and metro spaces when existing service providers are more than capable of handling that part of the equation for them. And those destinations include residential areas, industrial parks and SMB zones where they wish to site and future WiFi access points, as well.
If and when the company throws off signs that it is actually engaged in cornering the market on dark fiber – which is what it would take to match what has been claimed – I should like to be the first to acknowledge it and report what I know. Til then? They’re just taking care of business.
Frank
[*] posted by : August 28, 2006 9:18 PM
: August 28, 2006 9:18 PM
The article should remind the readers to use a VPN solution whenever they use a public ( = UNENCRYPTED) hotspot. Free solutions are OpenVPN (powerful, but complicated) or iPig (easy to use). Personally I use iPig
[*] posted by : September 03, 2006 6:11 PM
: September 03, 2006 6:11 PMLinks to this post:
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