All Systems Go? Test Driving Google’s Mountain View WiFi
|
Written By Reprise Media | July 27, 2006 | Share This
|
|
There’s little doubt about the merits of Google: The Search Engine. But skepticism has fueled much of the speculation concerning Google: the WiFi access provider. Particularly, there have been doubts about their monstrous project with Earthlink to bring a two-tiered citywide WiFi network to San Francisco, especially when they haven’t yet completed the long-awaited network for their much tinier hometown of Mountain View.
But word came yesterday from Katie Fehrenbacher at GigaOm saying that Google’s in the final testing phase of the Mountain View network, and the early returns are hopeful.
Katie, as a “trusted tester,” tooled around to various spots in the California town and tried out Google’s handiwork, making her blog post from a park in which she reports a connection quality of “pretty good: between 2 and 3 bars out of 4 on my Mac.” Judging by the number of little green icons on this map, (representing WiFi nodes), we’d say overall coverage looks pretty dense, and could pose a challenge to reproduce on the larger SanFran scale.
And even as the connection seems to work alright outside, getting a signal indoors could be a lot tougher, as Florida’s St. Cloud recently learned. Google anticipated such difficulties in the trusted tester email, which Katie reprints: “The best way to pull Google WiFi indoors is to get a high power WiFi Modem. These modems work best when placed by a window facing the closest Google WiFi radio…” If you’re a Mountain View resident wondering which model of modem to get, for the record, Google’s pimping the PePLink Surf 200BG.
Topics: Google, Search: Innovations, Technology |
“Pimping the Surf 200BG” indeed. I made the mistake of buying one of them. It comes with special firmware that forces you to connect to Earthlink only! Also, the functionality that allows the user to even see what other WiFi’s are available is wiped out!!! Unbelievable.