Google WiFi

I’m sitting in the Starbucks on the corner of Shoreline and Pear Avenue in Mountain View using Google WiFi for the first time. Out the window, about 25 yards away is a street light with a Google WiFi base station perched on top of it and two antennas sticking straight up. In addition, there is a directional antenna facing towards Google HQ not too far away that seems to be the uplink.

So far the experience has been pretty good - decent speeds, not busy and no cut-outs from my laptop. To use the service you will need a Google Account, an 802.11b/g card and a handy dandy base-station nearby. You see all of the locations here: http://wifi.google.com/city/mv/apmap.html

The network is primarily an outdoor network, although they do have Mountain View Public Library fully covered inside as well. I tried using it in various places around Mountain View from my new Palm TX Handheld and it seemed to be fairly pervasive but always barely there (1-2 bars on the Palm). In addition, speed was great and I appear to have a publicly accessible IP address. DHCP IP leases are for 1 hour and seem to be easy renewals.

I expected to be using T-Mobile from the Starbucks location - however both this one and another new one near Rengstorff Ave don’t have T-Mobile. Word is that management of the Strabucks are relying on Google to provide a reasonable signal nearby and thus to avoid having to pay for the T1 line into each location and maintaining service. Why both when Google is free? We’ll see how long that lasts…

technorati tags:googlewifi, wifi, google, tmobile

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