Google the Wi-Fi King?
So as I was going back through this month’s news, it seemed that one of the biggest news is that Google is bidding to provide free wi-fi service to the city of San Francisco. The proposal is to blanket 49 square miles with up to 30 access points per square mile and will server over 800,000 users.
So what is up with Google? I mean, their mission is to organize the world’s information, not to build telecom infrastructures. Many of the reports out there seem to think this is an obvious and logical step for Google to take. Their rationale, since Google’s organizing the world’s information, it makes sense that they provide users free access to the information as well.
Well, it seems logical. But that just doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to spend tens of millions of dollars to build a free wi-fi network.
But if you buy into the thinking that “the network is your computer” thinking, this may actually make sense. All of the applications that Google’s developing, Gmail, Google Reader, etc, are web-based (fully ajaxed, web 2.0, name the term you want to use) applications. With the recent deal with Sun, there’s a lot of rumors going around that says Google will provide a web-based version of OpenOffice.
Even if Google can provide all these applications, how does Google get users to go use it? Majority of the users when they start their browser, they will go to msn.com by default. That’s not to say these users won’t just type in google.com in their browser, but Microsoft gets a lot of their traffic due to IE’s default home page being msn.com.
In order for Google to get majority of the users to use their web-ased applications, they have to change the default destination on these users’ browsers. The first step Google took was to introduce Google Desktop. It’s a great tool that allows you to search your computer as well as the web. However, the problem with Google Desktop is that users still have to go to Google, download the tool and install it. So Google Desktop alone just won’t do the job.
So what better way to take control of the desktop and change the default destination of all users than to give them free access? Free access will make sure their first web page is Google instead of MSN.
As they all say, free is good. Free access will pretty much guarantee that majority of the 800,000 users will use ite, even if it’s only 300Kbits. Google says they will work with other providers to provide fee-based higher speed connection.
Some estimate says that the cost to build such a network is around $10 million. That’s approximately $13 per user, which is an extremely low price for acquiring users.
So is Google’s wi-fi ambition really a step in competing with Microsoft for the control of the desktop? I really think so.