• by Shankar Gupta , November 15, 2005

Google will this week appear before the city council of its hometown of Mountain View, Calif. to present a plan to offer free Wi-Fi access to the city, the company confirmed Monday.

"Google will appear before the Mountain View City Council to submit a proposal to offer free wireless Internet access to the city," said Chris Sacca, Google's principal of new business development. "This proposal is in the same spirit of making the world's information easily and quickly accessible as our recent San Francisco Wi-Fi bid and is technically comparable to that initiative."

Sacca was referring to Google's proposal to offer free 300kbps Wi-Fi access to the city of San Francisco--a bid that is competing with dozens of other companies for approval. Although it's free, Google's plan faces some competition from companies that say they can provide faster access.

Some industry observers hold that Google wants to offer Wi-Fi service in order to offer local advertisers more precise geographical targeting. As a Wi-Fi provider, Google would know where users are based on which hotspots they're connecting from. This ability means that Google could serve users ads for the pizza place down the block when they search on the term "pizza."

Although Google watchers speculate that the plans to deliver Wi-Fi in San Francisco proper and now Mountain View may portend a more wide-reaching scheme on Google's part, Sacca said that Google didn't plan to extend Wi-Fi to other regions. "Google has no plans at this time to expand our Wi-Fi efforts beyond the Bay Area," he said.