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Thursday August 20, 2009
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 Remember metropolitan Wi-Fi? What was supposed to be the saving grace of metropolitan areas fizzled out quickly, in part because of 3G connectivity, and consequently, as a result of communities questioning the networks' effectiveness.
One metropolitan Wi-Fi infrastructure continues to thrive, however: the one installed in Mountain View, Calif., the home of Google. Visit the Computer History Museum on Shoreline Blvd., for example, turn on Wi-Fi, and "GoogleWiFi" pops up, requiring only a free Gmail login to access the network. The network will celebrate its third anniversary this month.
In a recent press release from Tropos (which owns the routers on the network), the Google Wi-Fi network now covers 12 square miles, and serves 16,000 to 19,000 users at a time. On a
daily basis, the network now transports close to 600 gigabytes of user
data -- double the volume from just two years ago. Tom Ayers, Tropos' chief executive, claims the network handles more data and users than any other comparable network in the world.
And, not surprisingly, more and more is from handhelds, Google said.
"We continue to
experience extremely high demand - both in terms of users and
bandwidth," said Karl Garcia at Google, who leads the Google WiFi
project. "We've seen the iPhone and other Wi-Fi enabled handheld devices
as significant drivers of the high demand we see. Currently nearly a
quarter of all devices that connect to our network are handhelds,
compared to almost none when we launched the network."
A 2006 compilation of metro Wi-Fi performance by Novarum is here, placing Google's network second behind a St.Cloud, Flor. network operated by Cyberspot. That's the same year PC Magazine did some wardriving to test it, which turned up some initial problems.
One planned municipal Wi-Fi project is definitely dead, however. Earthlink, which at one time planned to install a municipal system in San Francisco, is completely out of the muni Wi-Fi business, a company representative confirmed. Some analysts suspect that muni Wi-Fi may make a comeback, though, as more smartphones adopt the technology.
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September 29, 2009 11:28 AM
The City of Minneapolis wireless network transports about 4000 gigabytes of user data a day, over 6x as much as Mountain View. And volume has tripled over the past year.