Google WiFi in Mountain View: 350 Tropos, 50 Alvarions

I dropped by the
Market Place 2006
fair today, hosted at the Computer
History Museum by the Chamber of
Commerce Mountain View. Though I’ve worked in Mountain View for almost 6
years, and lived there for over 5, I’m always finding new businesses - so I
thought I’d drop by to see what was going on. Plus, it was within walking
distance of my office.

There, Minnie Ingersoll of Google was giving a talk about their Wifi
deployment in Mountain View. Neato!

Being a geek, and a network engineer in a past life, here are some of the notes I took:

• They are going to be offering 1 megabit access.
• Focus on outdoor areas (parks, businesses, libraries)
  versus homes.
• Will be promoting CPE’s (Customer Premise Equipment) so that you have
  better reception indoors.
• They have 350 Tropos units around Mountain View. (One of which is
  outside my office window!)
• They use a mesh network – the Tropos units talk to each other, so the
  only wiring they had to do was power.
• 1 in 7 (50) of the sites connect back to an Alvarion gateway.
• There are 3 of these Alvarion gateways: 1 at Googleplex, 1 at 444 Castro
  St in Downtown (it’s one of the tallest buildings around), and 1 at St.
  Greg’s High School’s Football Field lights.
• Rolling release: June-Small, July-Large, August-Really large.
• People who connect will immediate see a login page. They will need to
  login with their Google Account to use the wifi.
• After logging in, people will then see a portal page, with a map, a
  search box, and a few "modules" on the sides for things like weather, mail,
  and etc.
• A FAQ can be found here:
  
  http://wifi.google.com/city/mv/faq.html 

Here’s a picture of a tower that I took:

I also got some free chicken sausage samples from the Tied House - so much for the calories spent during the walk. In any case, I’m curious to see how this will work out when this service goes live and I’m in
Downtown! I’m pretty sure that MetroFi (the free wifi in Sunnyvale) doesn’t require a login. But they do something else… (my apartment only gets reception on certain days during certain weather.)