There's a catch to free Wi-Fi

Don't ditch that wireless router just yet. Google's proposal to offer free wireless Net access throughout the city of San Francisco--the first of many areas, according to much speculation--may sound appealing, but it wouldn't be the same as the high-speed DSL or cable connections used in homes and businesses today.

The chief difference is speed. Google's service would apparently top out at 300 kbps. That's about five times the speed of telephone dial-up connections, but hardly the kind of capacity needed for many high-bandwidth services and applications. So any reports about the death of traditional telecom and cable carriers would appear greatly exaggerated.

Another concern would be the coverage under today's Wi-Fi technologies, which other cities have found trickier to deploy than originally thought. Blogma once tried to use San Francisco's Wi-Fi hot spot in an area called Union Square: The connection was spotty at best and wouldn't work at all across the street.

While we applaud any move that encourages more competition toward universal broadband access, Google's plan--if approved--would be only a first step in an unfortunately long process.

Blog community response:

"There is no such thing as free WiFi. If it were economically viable for Google to provide this service to the city and make up the expense through ads (the source of almost all of Google's profits), they would be doing it everywhere."
--Atlas Blogged

"There are still a lot of unanswered questions, the most important being related to privacy. Will Google be watching users?"
--Ars Technica

"That sound you hear is a bunch of incumbent telcos gasping. No, WiFi covering an entire city probably isn't the best solution, and Google may find it a bit more difficult to implement than they expect it to be... but once people start expecting free ubiquitous internet access, the ballgame begins to change pretty significantly--even if that internet access isn't very robust."
--techdirt

"In the end, sometimes new systems start with the free--but ultimately, if there is value in an economic chain, pricing will follow. It may not be the way the old folks did it--but it will come."
--Rambles