Sunnyvale, California Gets Free WiFi!   12/7/2005 - 1,622 views,

And it really is free - although to use the free service you have to be willing to accept the banner advertising which comes along with it. But hey, advertising while surfing the web is already part of the current paradigm (when did that happen, anyway?) and the price is certainly right!

Said Otto Lee, Vice Mayor (heh) of Sunnyvale, “We’re proud to be the first city in the United States to implement free advertising-sponsored Wi-Fi service for the benefit of residents and local businesses. We think it’s fitting that one of the major cities in the Silicon Valley, home to headquarters of leading high-tech companies, be the first to get advertiser-sponsored service off the ground.”

Are they actually the very first to get it up and running? (And is it up and running? See below for my observations.)

According to Chuck Haas, CEO of MetroFi, “There’s been quite a lot of buzz in the Bay Area about free community wireless service, and MetroFi is the first company to deliver on its promises to implement it. Our Sunnyvale advertising-sponsored network, recently-launched free hot zones in San Francisco and subscription-based networks in Cupertino and Santa Clara make us one of the most experienced and action-oriented Wi-Fi providers in the country.”

Now, excited was I, so last night I whipped out my iBook, and drove around Sunnyvale in the area indicated by the map at MetroFi as being within the wifi cloud. In only one location did I actually pick up the MetroFi signal, and there I got an error when trying to connect.

But hey, that was just one test, and it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work - I think that I’ll need to do a lot more testing. So if you see a crazed professor, Starbucks in hand, walking or driving around with an open iBook, odds are that’s me.