Back then before 2010, Google did a cool thing that no one even noticed then. The search giant decided to serve people up with free broadband Wifi access to the Mountain View town, where the company is based. The service has been free all along, with all expenses being fielded by Google, until the year 2010. After that, the company then decided to make it a paid Wifi service, before they again changed in 2014 to new form of public Wifi.
In 2009, the company was using over 500 Tropos networks and Metromesh routers for its networking uses. Then, 95 percent of the Mountain View side had access to public and free Wifi, and then it was serving about 16,000 different users a month. There were also about 500 GB of data in the 24 hour period.
Google also made sure that they would get about three aggregate points, through which the traffic would pass through and one of them was encrypted. GoogleWifi was the insecure one and GoogleWifiSecure provided all the encryption and security that users wanted. Google also provided VPN access to the users which was called the Google Secure Access and it also had a list if the quality VPN software providers.
The service was announced back in 2005 and a year later it went live. However, in 2012 the number of connections started to decrease as some members started to complain that they had complications when connecting to the networks and if they did connect they would still encounter other issues.
A statement at the time said that the city had received several complaints of the performance and the reliability of the free Google Wifi service in the city. One report by ComputerWorld noted that it was almost impossible for the users to get working connections of the wifi hotspots in several points in the city including the library and the City Hall. Library patrons actually changed their connections from the Google free services to the wired connections provided at the library.
However, since the coming and going of the Google free Wifi service, they have come up with other several solutions in recent years. In 2013, Starbucks adopted the Google free Wifi and started using it, replacing the ATT Wifi service they were using before. The service caught up in about 7,000 Starbucks locations. The company is also expected to turn about 10,000 of the old phone booths in New York into a Wifi hotspot which would be powered by ads. The booths will work as a free charging center, free domestic call provider and also information center.
