Google’s Mt. View Cloud, based on Tropos gear, is powering up this month. But Google does not plan to use ads to pay for the free wireless Internet service, reports C/Net, and there’s no secret plan to monetize the service, a Google Wi-Fi product manager said Wednesday.
“The reason it is free is because…we want to get a lot of people on it,” Larry Alder of Google said during a panel discussion on wireless projects in cities at the Supernova 2006 conference.
The service, which is fully deployed but not yet available to all Mountain View residents, is a test bed that will help Google understand the technology, Alder said.
Google has hung about 350 nodes on city light poles, which will serve about 70,000 people in 12 square miles.
Nail Kennedy says the three aggregation points in Mountain View are at Google, Red Hat, and St. Francis High, a local private high school. The three aggregation points are plotted on the map (above).
The data packets travel from node to node until they hit a gateway, which has a bidirectional antenna and sends the data on to one of three building tops. Earthlink and Google won the San Francisco Wi-Fi contract with similar architecture. Google will simply lease space wholesale on the San Francisco system, delivering “free” 300Kbps service to everyone.
Tropos Networks says its Tropos Metro Compatible Extensions will ensure the highest performance and reliability when third-party devices are connected to a metro-scale Wi-Fi mesh network. A $170 client device is available from PeP Link (left) that will enable residential users to access the wireless cloud, indoors.
Unwire Portland, the organization formed to choose a city-wide WiFi network for the city of Portland, Oregon, chose MetroFi for a $10 million, 134 square mile wireless network that could serve some 500,000 people.
The wireless “cloud” will serve citizens, municipal workers and more than 1000 wireless parking meters via hotspots mounted on lampposts and rooftops owned by the city. It’s similar to San Francisco’s 54 square mile “cloud” and Philadelphia’s 135 square mile city cloud, awarded last year, both to Earthlink.
MetroFi, however, has bet the farm on location-based advertising.
MetroFi will provide 1 Mbps free (with a banner ad on the top of each web page). The Google model would restrict speed to 300kbps. And now they’re saying both their San Francisco cloud and their home-grown Mountain View cloud will be ad-free.
MetroFi is dropping fees on their wireless “clouds” in Cupertino, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale (above). Now everything is free. MetroFi hopes advertising will pay the freight and lower their cost of customer support.
MetroFi plans a “free” 1Mbps Cloud covering 134 square miles in Portland, Oregon. It will (apparently) be a two-tier system. The 1 Mbps ad-supported network is free. The ad-free network costs $19.95/month.
If 20% of Portland’s 500,000 potential users got “free” service, that might cost MetroFi $1M/month (figuring a wholesale cost to deliver service at $10/mo per subscriber). If each subscriber clicked on one banner daily (netting, say $.50-$1 a day), MetroFi might make money. MetroFi is betting that “free” will pay off, but nobody can say for sure.
Of course many “experts” still are doubtful that large-scale “city clouds” will work at all — at any price.
“The key to successful muni wireless deployments is Due Diligence“, says analyst Craig Settles. He interviewed 12 cities, counties and vendors involved with municipal wireless including New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Chaska, Minnesota.
Kevin Werbach started Supernova three years ago. Their Agenda, Speakers, Workshops and Weblog covered municipal wireless extensively.
Related DailyWireless articles include; Google WiFi Interview, MetroFi Goes Free, Will Free Work?, Google Gets Mt. View Cloud, Earthlink and Google win San Francisco and Portland Chooses MetroFi for 134 Mile Cloud and Intergalatic MuniFi Management.
