The network goes live Wednesday morning: Google's gift to its headquarters city is now labeled the largest purely free Wi-Fi network in the U.S. This qualification is necessary because there are larger cities, including some other Bay Area cities, that have advertising-supported free networks (such as MetroFi's) or limited free usage each day. St. Cloud used to be the largest free, non-commercial network, but they have a third the residents. The network was delayed a couple of months from an earlier launch plan to increase density to fill in niches.

Google deployed 380 Tropos nodes and says they spent $1m. The network isn't intended to provide robust indoor coverage, and isn't optimized in my view of their plan for bridges, although Mountain View's general architecture should allow bridged connections pretty easily.

The New York Times focuses on Google not building networks beyond Mountain View and San Francisco, the latter of which EarthLink has said that Google will be a key tenant on a for-fee network that EarthLink will construct. I have said dozens of times since the idea first floated of nationwide Google-Fi that metro-scale Wi-Fi is a low-margin business; applications that run on networks are much higher. Why would Google sink capital into a network that others could build and they could leverage?

9:18:10 AM    

A third round of private financing brings in $65m: The money was raised to finance the acquisition of cell/Wi-Fi airport operator Concourse Communications, which runs services for airport authorities in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Detroit, Chicago (both), New York (all three metro airports), and elsewhere.

They'll use the excess cash to "provide working capital to strengthen the company's balance sheet and provide funds for future growth." Which, translated, means, "We have money but not enough to move ahead at the speed we want to, and we want to buy more companies."

Boingo has raised nearly $100m in three rounds, the last of which was in 2003. The firm says they expect they will not raise additional private funds.

I have said many times that those that believe that Boingo's entire business is customer-facing resale of aggregated hotspot access might consider that the firm has an awful lot of staying power and an awful lot of staff to perform that one function. Remember that they are a software developer, just for instance.

9:16:36 AM