Free Metro WiFi service in Bay area.

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Lifer
Jan 13, 2000
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I once saw it pop up in the my wireless list but wasn't able to connect to it. Seems that Metro WiFi is only in the south bay area though there might be other free WiFi services readily available to regular users in other parts of the country.

I wonder if any of you guys living in Santa Clara or Sunnyvale can connect to the service.

In the San Jose Mercury News.

Mountain View's MetroFi announced Monday it was abandoning fees for its wireless Internet service, giving residents in several Silicon Valley cities WiFi for free.
The catch? A half-inch-deep strip of local advertising will be at the top of a person's browser window at all times. Customers who don't want the banner, however, can continue paying the going rate of $19.95 a month to get online.
MetroFi currently offers wireless Internet, or WiFi, services to residents across 25 square miles of Santa Clara, Cupertino and parts of Sunnyvale. Both the free and paid services offer data-transfer speeds of 1 megabit per second for downloads and 256 kilobits per second for uploads, comparable to DSL speeds, MetroFi Chief Executive Chuck Haas said.
Also on Monday, the company threw its hat in the ring to expand several city-operated WiFi hotspots in downtown San Jose. Other companies to submit bids by the Monday deadline were Global Netoptex of San Jose, Proxim Wireless of San Jose, American Mobile Broadband of Orange, Rite Brain Consulting of Littleton, Colo., and Invisi-Wire Broadband Networks of Ruston, La.
MetroFi's ad-based business model doesn't answer the question of whether large-scale WiFi networks can be financially viable for the cities that want them. Local governments across the country, including those in San Francisco, Philadelphia and San Jose, are wrestling with how to pay for such networks, which leaders hope to install to bring affordable Internet access to poor residents, streamline city services and improve public-safety communications.
Last week, a Silicon Valley group announced what may be the ultimate wireless Internet project in terms of ambition, cost and sheer technological difficulty. Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, a coalition of business, government and education leaders, will seek bids in April to bring wireless Internet access to residents across all 1,500 square miles of Silicon Valley, from East Palo Alto through Santa Cruz.
But the cost of building and running a wireless network can get quite expensive. JupiterResearch estimates that they cost $150,000 per square mile to install and maintain for five years.
Industry experts say it's probably too early to tell whether a subscription or ad-supported model will prove the most successful.
Test success
For MetroFi, the decision to make its networks free came about six months ago, around the time San Francisco sounded its call for companies to submit plans for building a city WiFi network. Both MetroFi and search giant Google offered to install an ad-supported network there for free. Google has since agreed to also build a free-with-ads network in Mountain View by summer.
Haas said Google's push into citywide WiFi networking did not play a role in the decision to make all of MetroFi's networks free.
``We really look at what business is best for MetroFi and best for the cities that we operate in,'' he said. ``We don't typically look at what other companies are doing.''
MetroFi began a free, ad-supported WiFi network last month in parts of residential Sunnyvale as a trial for the new business model. As MetroFi had predicted, the company signed up more customers in just a few weeks than it had in the first 90 days of fee-based services in Santa Clara and Cupertino, Haas said.
So rather than spending any more money wooing paying customers, MetroFi decided to use that money to expand its networks, he said.
``A free model allows you to capture customers rapidly without spending, branding and marketing costs,'' he said. ``So we can then focus on using our capital to build additional networks.''
Yet ad-supported networks pose their own financial challenges, said JupiterResearch analyst Julie Ask. Companies must pay workers to sell ads to local businesses, and there is a lot of competition from newspapers, phone books and 411 services looking for those same ad dollars, she said.
Revenue challenge
In the end, successful large-scale WiFi providers may not be able to depend solely on advertising.
``If you build one of these networks, it's going to take the sum of a lot of different revenue streams to pay for itself,'' she said. ``It's challenging without adding together a lot of revenue streams.''
MetroFi plans to move into even more Silicon Valley cities, including its bid to expand San Jose's downtown WiFi hotspots. The company would not release the number of its customers, but Haas said it is ``in the thousands.''
With consumers increasingly concerned about their identities and Web surfing habits being sold or otherwise misused, Haas said MetroFi will not save or use any customer's identity for advertising purposes. MetroFi will distribute only city-specific advertising, he said.
For instance, a person on the network in Santa Clara will see ads for businesses in that city, he said. But in the future, MetroFi will be sending advertising to customers that are more tailored to their interests, with, for example, ads for music appearing when a customer searches for a music-related site, Haas said.
/Q]
 

zoiks

Lifer
Jan 13, 2000
11,787
3
81
I had read once that Google was going to launch the service in SF first. Dunno the status of that yet.