Add one more city where Google plans to offer free Wi-Fi: City of Mountain View, California.
The search engine giant will appear before the Mountain View City Council and will submit a proposal to offer free wireless Internet access (Wi-Fi) to the city. The latest bid comes close on the heels of Google’s plans (if approved) to build a free wifi network in San Francisco.
Business 2.0 magazine had first reported earlier in the year that the company was building its own fiber network, and also had plans to build out a free ad-supported network in city of San Francisco. Since then, more details have emerged, and the company says it is going to use San Francisco WiFi Network to learn more about the location based services. Technically the Mountain View proposal is said to be the same as company’s plans for San Francisco. As per that bid, “residents (and visitors) will enjoy a free 300 kilobits per second, always on connection anywhere in the city.”
When queried about the Mountain View WiFi Hot Zone plans, a Google spokesperson in an emailed statement said, “Providing free Wi-Fi access to Mountain View is one way Google can support the citizens and businesses in the community where we’re headquartered. We look forward to speaking with the City Council and hope they accept this proposal so we can offer free Wi-Fi access to the residents and visitors of Mountain View.” Google says it has no plans to offer free Wi-Fi access beyond the Bay Area.
Why does Google even bother with a relatively small area if it plans not to expand beyond. There are a lot of hassles and costs to the learning curve coupled with no economy of scale efficiences if further expansion isn’t planned.
What’s up with that?
i imagine being a mountain view company, they have some goodwill in that part of the country. nothing more i would guess. it would be cheaper to extend their own networks and build out the network?
Kickass, I am moving to Mountain View this month. With $15/month DSL hookup broadband is not terribly expensive anyway, but free WiFi would be always nice.
Kapp’s Pizza in Mountain View (on Castro St) had a WiFi by Google sign in their window up until a couple weeks ago. I guess they decided to think bigger.
Kickass! Looks like buying a house in 94043 was a good move after all.
Of course, steel construction could really kill that in a hurry. Looks like Speakeasy shouldn’t write off my $50 just yet.
I think Mountain View would make a good test bed for future wider deployments…I doubt they will be content just to cover SF, or even the entire peninsula, if there turns out to be a business model buried in there somewhere…
Maybe Google should buy someone like t-mobile and offer data(which is pretty much throughout major metro) and voice/IM. Data for laptop/desktop and Google can pretty much give the wireless card away relatively cheap and the cell phones can be pre-installed with google IM and software to complement their offerings like IM, Maps, Search,GoogleTV in the future and so on and on. Just a thought…
I saw only a headline in Palo Alto Daily about Google offering free wireless in the city of Palo Alto — didn’t have time to check further. Any confirmation of this? Haven’t been able to confirm online. Maybe they were talking about Mountain View as is reported in the SJ Mercury News and here on this blog. I’m hoping Google will offer free wi-fi in other bay area cities pretty soon, as I’m still on 56K dialup.
Sorry, I was wrong about the above post — after checking further, the Palo Alto Daily was reporting on Google’s offer to the city of Mountain View, not for Palo Alto.
See my local SF WIFI blog, Google is offering Moutain View free wifi to put the screws to San Francisco city officials on their offer there.
http://www.webnetic.net