SF Wifi More Than Flipping a Switch 114
An anonymous reader writes "News.com is carrying a story looking at the costly rollout of the Google/EarthLink SF Wifi project." From the article: "EarthLink said it expects the project to run to between $6 million and $8 million in initial costs, which include attaching radios and receivers to utility poles throughout the city. Within 10 years it expects the whole network, complete with upgrades and maintenance, to cost about $15 million. Finer financial details of the project haven't been made public, but the plan calls for EarthLink and Google to contribute to the initial cost of building the network. It's not clear what the split between the two companies will be. Once the network is built, Google will pay EarthLink for access to the network on a wholesale basis. In order to make access free to people in San Francisco, Google will use revenue generated from local advertisements to pay for access to the EarthLink network."
Re:This advertising thing (Score:5, Funny)
1) If you're using a Windows machine, it'll probably just blue screen you, you'll curse Microsoft, and probably just use Google the next time, I mean, what kind of worthless operating system/browser pair can't even load their own company's search page. Sometime though, it'll do the second option, just to keep people entertained.
2) If you are Linux/UNIX/Macix it renders a custom search page for you that LOOKS like the search engine you requested, but actually returns Google results and displays Google ads. Google considers this a risky play, as they could just redirect you to the Google home page, but they feel its necessary to maintain the cloak on this operation.
Hey, this is just what you do, if you have virtually limitless processing power, bandwidth, and storage.