Andrew Orlowski, in The Register, has another take on the Earthlink/Google WiFi cloud in San Francisco:
San Francisco’s municipal Wi-Fi initiative isn’t the biggest such project in the world, but it may be the most keenly watched. And after this week’s award to Google and Earthlink, the battle to win the best deal for the city’s residents is only just starting.
That’s largely thanks to San Francisco’s activist community, who’ve tackled the tough questions that evangelist sites like Muniwireless – which rely on technology vendors for sponsorship – have avoided.
As the smoke clears, it’s evident that San Francisco has failed to win the kind of deal for its poorer and less computer literate residents than the one Earthlink provided in Philadelphia. In San Francisco, Earthlink will operate the high speed, pay-for service, while Google will operate the free, low-speed tier.
However, while Earthlink provided Philly citizens with 10,000 free computers, and skims a percentage from the paid-for service to fund training initiatives, no such guarantees have been made in Baghdad by the Bay.
“It’s very disappointing,” says Sydney Levy, program director of Media Alliance and a co-ordinator for Internet 4 Everyone.
Levy also says that the free portion is too slow. While Mountain View residents will get 1mbit/s free from Google, San Francisco’s is 300kbit/s.
“It’s going to be another digital divide,” says Levy. “It’s going to be another dinosaur”.
Google will be an anchor tenant of the Earthlink-built network and plans to retain the location data for up to 180 days before deleting it. The companies will now enter final contract negotiations with the city. San Francisco newspapers have a variety of opinions on the proposal.
Google hopes to pay for their free 300Kbps service through contextual advertising. Google will be able to track its users to within 100-200 feet of their location to serve them with relevant advertising from local businesses. This would open up a new level of advertising opportunities for the company, allowing it to serve tightly focused ads on its web pages from small businesses in the immediate area.
Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, spoke tonight to a packed crowd at the Economic Club in Chicago, talking about how Google views the world and what they hope to do in the coming years.
Analysts like Om Malik have speculated that the San Francisco bid could be a prelude to a nationwide push, although Google officials have consistantly denied that.
However, Dow Jones now reports that EarthLink and Google plan to bid for a second U.S. city. The two companies have not yet determined which city they will target, said EarthLink CEO Garry Betty, but they intend to propose building a network that would mainly be sustained by paid subscriptions sold by EarthLink. The company would offer free access via Google’s ad-supported local search service and Google would share some of the ad revenue with EarthLink, says the Dow Jones news service.
Wireless Silicon Valley has a business plan (pdf) for developing wireless solutions for Silicon Valley communities, according to MuniWireless. Their members include the Wireless Communications Alliance (WCA), a non-profit Silicon Valley business league which sponsors MetroSIG, a forum for discussion of all aspects of Municipal Wireless.
DailyWireless has more on The Earthlink/Google SF Cloud and The Dark Side of Free.
UPDATE: The latest Om and Niall PodSession covers location based services and their impact on privacy.
