Wi-Fi startup to pick up where Google left off in SF
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InfoWorld - Wireless networking startup Meraki plans to deliver free wireless Internet access, supported by advertising, across San Francisco by the end of the year, it announced Friday.
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Although its ambitious plan to provide free Wi-Fi for the city of San Francisco is on hold, Google trumpets its success providing free internet service to the much smaller city of Mountain View, some 30 miles to the south.
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Wireless networking startup Meraki plans to deliver free wireless Internet access, supported by advertising, across San Francisco by the end of the year, it announced Friday.An earlier&#160;attempt by Google and EarthLink&#160;to offer&#160;free city-wide Wi-Fi access in San Francisco&#160;foundered in August when&#160;EarthLink pulled out. They had planned a two-tier service, with faster, paid access provided by EarthLink and a more limited, advertising-funded service to be offered by Google. The search engine giant is also an investor in Meraki.Meraki will base the service on an existing project covering parts of the city, Free the Net, which has signed up 40,000 users over an area of 5 square kilometers since it began last March.To avoid the need for extensive cabling, Meraki will build the backbone of the network using a mesh network of solar-powered wireless repeaters installed on rooftops. The nodes will use some of their wireless capacity to offer Internet access to those nearby, and the rest to haul traffic back, via adjacent nodes, to the network&#39;s core.The company is looking for city residents willing to put a repeater on their roof. Those hosting a repeater will get free access to the service -- but so will their neighbors -- although for them, the signal may not be as strong. Although devices are shared, Meraki aims to deliver data rates of around 1Mbps&#160; to each user.Meraki will pay the cost of rolling out the service, and no public funds are involved, it said. Investors have offered the company an additional $20 million in venture capital to fund the move, it announced Friday.Ozone in Paris offers a similar wireless Internet service based on a network of wireless repeaters. Its service is only free for those who host repeaters, though: others must pay &#8364;18 ($26) a month.
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SAN JOSE, Calif. _ Gordon Hamachi, a software developer who lives in Mountain View, Calif., just started using the new free wireless computer network that Google has launched to cover the entire city.
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arvind s. grover writes &quot;San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom stated yesterday in his state of the city address that every San Francisco resident will have free wireless internet access.
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Starbucks and AT&T said they would start offering a mix of free and paid wireless Internet service in most of Starbucksâs American shops, beginning this spring.
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A Silicon Valley startup wants to shake up the telecommunications industry with a $399 gizmo that provides free, unlimited domestic phone calls for homes with broadband Internet service.
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By Justin Buehler, Victoria Advocate, Texas  Jun. 4--BAY CITY -- The entire city of Bay City is going Wi-Fi.
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With a rash of muni Wi-Fi projects collapsing, companies and cities realize their initial approaches to providing ubiquitous, free network connectivity aren't working. The problem is Wi-Fi is too expensive to deploy, and there's not enough user demand.
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A local startup is selling technology to enable the average person to set up and manage their own WiFi wireless network. BeeTelecom Inc.
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The city that was among the first to be wired for electricity in the 19th century wants to become one of the first to go wireless in the 21st.
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SANTA CLARA, Calif. - Silicon Valley and the San Francisco Bay Area, the world's technology hub, is starting to buzz again for the first time since the dot-com bust. The Valley's infamous start-up community is coming back, thanks to start-ups like digital media firm Dabble and its contemporaries.
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An ambitious plan to equip Silicon Valley with wireless public broadband services is proceeding with great hopes but many challenges.The Wireless Silicon Valley project was the subject of a presentation at the MuniWireless conference in Santa Clara, Calif. on Tuesday afternoon. Expected to cost $100 million to $150 million, Wireless Silicon Valley involves developing an architecture covering 1,500 square miles. It would be used by around 40 cities in Silicon Valley, each of which has contributed $2,500 to seed the effort. While there are no officially defined boundaries, Silicon Valley is generally considered to be a span of California cities in the San Francisco Bay Area, including San Jose.The project's vision involves connecting anyone, anywhere, involving any device, said Seth Fearey, project lead for Wireless Silicon Valley and vice president of Joint Venture, Silicon Valley Network."We're going to move beyond the model of laptops connecting the Internet doing e-mail and the Web. We want to connect devices and things," Fearey said.The network would only function outdoors and provide capabilities ranging from citizen access to the Internet to provision of public services. Users would be able to maintain a connection if they linked up in Daly City, just south of San Francisco, and traveled to Gilroy 71 miles from San Francisco.Economic development is the top priority of Wireless Silicon Valley, with the idea being to connect small businesses, attract businesses, and make Silicon Valley an exciting place to be."People coming here for conventions would spend more money if they knew where to go," such as being able to find movie theaters via wireless access, said Fearey."We can use this network to help give them that information," he said.Benefits of the plan are to make a network that is much more useful and leverages economies of scale, one that deploys multiple technologies together, provides more revenue opportunities, and accommodates government staff.Challenges, however, include finding an owner/operator and operating on an unproven business model. Also, the network has a high cost to build and the needs of low-revenue areas must be balanced with those of high-revenue areas. The network also takes time to deploy."We're breaking new ground here," said Fearey. Investors want to see how the network will work and are struggling to determine how they will make moneyThe cities participating in the program are quite small, except for San Jose, Fearey said. "This is a big, big challenge," financially, he said.A request for proposal was issued, resulting in companies such as IBM and Cisco offering to provide equipment and Azulstar to operate the network. These vendors comprise the Metro Connect team that intends to provide the network infrastructure, own and operate it, and sell services. Azulstar, however, was not able to raise money to get the project moving. Now, additional operators are being sought.?The goal with the network is create lots of opportunities for the operator of the network to make money not just from consumer subscriptions and adverting but also from other services such as provision of point-to-point advertising.A variety of applications has been suggested, ranging from wireless reading of water meters to irrigation control and wireless parking meters that could have fluctuating prices based on the time of day.During an earlier panel session at the conference Tuesday, Joanne Hovis, president of Columbia Telecommunications, said that if Google acquires the 700-MHz frequencies to be auctioned off by the FCC, that could change the wireless market.Hovis noted there is much speculation about Google's plans. One audience member speculated Google could open up a wireless network for everybody.?"My personal opinion is I'm not sure Google is serious about bidding on that spectrum," Hovis said. It also would be a few years before Google could build its network, Hovis said.
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EarthLink Inc.'s current contract to build a municipal Wi-Fi network in San Francisco appears to be dead follow...
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(InfoWorld) - Portland, Oregon, became the latest city to launch a municipal wireless network, starting a free, ad-supported service featuring localized content and services from Microsoft Corp.'s MSN. The network, being built by MetroFi Inc., went live in a few central neighborhoods on Tuesday and is intended eventually to provide Internet access in 95 percent of the city's indoor and outdoor spaces. Cities and counties around the U.S. wantÂ to build wireless networksÂ to promote business and tourism, provide Internet access to residents who can't get or afford wired broadband, or add another choice to the usual options of cable or DSL (Digital Subscriber Line). Municipalities in some other countries, including Taipei, are also part of the trend. Traditional carriers have opposed city-owned networks. But many municipalities, including Portland, are simply contracting with private service providers to build, own and operate their systems. Portland's is the first service to feature local content from MSN. It will appear on a special MSN home page for Portland that will always appear after users start up the service. When they first try to use the network, users will see a MetroFi page that asks them three anonymous demographic questions, such as whether they are male or female. Then the network will remember the client device's MAC (media access control) address, and the next time the user goes on the network, there won't be any questions, according to MetroFi. There are no plans now for services or ads that use the subscriber's physical location in the city. MetroFi has built municipal wireless networks in several cities, including Aurora, Illinois, and Cupertino, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, San Jose, Foster City and Concord in the San Francisco Bay area. It uses mesh technology in which a Wi-Fi access point can reach the Internet partly through other access points rather than needing a direct wired connection. The service in Portland will deliver speeds comparable to DSL, according to the company. To pay for the service, banner ads about 1 inch (2.54 centimeters) deep will appear continuously at the top of the user's screen, Van Haaften said. MetroFi has already secured a handful of local sponsors and plans to add more over time. The City of Portland will act as an anchor tenant, with public-safety and other employees using the network for improved connectivity in the field. MetroFi may offer the city a special grade of service, Van Haaften said. The service became available Tuesday in Pioneer Courthouse Square and in much of the Buckman, Lloyd and Kerns neighborhoods. The network, using access points mounted on street light poles, is scheduled for completion by mid-2008. To improve reception inside homes, MetroFi recommends indoor modems from Ruckus Wireless Inc. that can amplify the signal from the service.ADVERTISEMENTNEW IT SERVICES FROM IBM: EASIER TO BUY AND IMPLEMENTDiscover a simpler, more cost-effective way to get the solutions your company needs to grow more flexible and efficient.
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(InfoWorld) - San Francisco is going to kick the tires of an alternative to theÂ citywide Wi-Fi planÂ from EarthLink and Google. The budget analyst of the City and County of San Francisco agreed on Monday to study to financial feasibility of a wireless network paid for and owned by the city. The agency expects to finish its report by December, a representative said at a meeting Monday of the Board of Supervisors' Government Audit and Oversight Committee. The city's Wi-Fi plan and the process of developing it has come under fire from several quarters, not least from some members of the Board of Supervisors. Supervisor Jake McGoldrick formally requested the feasibility study after criticizing the way in which the administration of Mayor Gavin Newsom settled on theÂ EarthLink-Google plan. It calls for a network to be built at no cost to the city and owned by the two service providers. "It really got rammed and jammed and fast-tracked," McGoldrick said in April. If the city owned the network, he believes it would have more control overÂ issues such as user privacyÂ and prompt upgrading of the technology. The analyst's plan to deliver the report by December satisfied McGoldrick, who talked with representatives of the agency at Monday's meeting. The city also expects to wrap up its negotiations with EarthLink and Google in early December, said Brian Roberts, a senior policy analyst for the city's Department of Telecommunications and Information Services. The department has no position on the plan for the feasibility study, he said: The budget analyst's report will give the supervisors more information to decide whether to go with the EarthLink-Google deal, he said. Also Monday, a nonprofit organization said a city-owned network would pay for itself in just over four years. The Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR) released the results of a feasibility study report that was sought by Media Alliance, an Oakland, California, group that has pushed for broader access to technology. ILSR envisioned San Francisco building the network for an initial capital investment of about $10 million, to be repaid over five years from services revenue. The city would create a nonprofit body to sell access to the network to service providers wholesale. Upgrades would cost about $9 million over ten years, the group said. The plan is similar to onesÂ advocated in some other cities, such as that of the Boston Wireless Task Force. ILSR said its estimates, which in part assume that 10 percent of households and businesses would become paid subscribers at about $15 per month, were conservative. A better plan would be for the city to expand its current 43-mile fiber network to eventually reach all homes, while deploying wireless in certain areas in the meantime, ILSR said. Fiber costs more to deploy but less to maintain. The city didn't provide enough information for a complete analysis of this plan, ILSR said.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Will Google pick up where Apple left off?