As Google prepares to roll out a new municipal Wi-Fi service in the city of its birth, the search giant dismissed suggestions of a nationwide rollout. The free service in Mountain View, Calif. is set
to become generally available today after nine months of testing. Google also plans to install Wi-Fi service in San Francisco, in a partnership with EarthLink--but its Internet service ambitions end
there, an executive tells
The New York Times. There are roughly 300 open contracts for municipal Wi-Fi services around the country, and Google has not bid on any of them. The exec says Google
is using these network experiments as an exercise in the value of competition. "There wouldn't be a Net neutrality debate in this country if we really had a competitive environment for access," he
adds. "The Internet is not as pervasive as it could be, or democratic." In Mountain View, Google has deployed some 380 lamppost-mounted Wi-Fi transceivers, and is investing a considerable amount in
promoting the benefits of wireless access. At first, it will only offer one-megabit data rates for both uploading and downloading information, which is slower than DSL and broadband cable.
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