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Google finds that WiFi isn't as easy as it looks

It takes more WiFi nodes than you'd think to set up a municipal wireless hot-zone, Google is finding, as it "unwires" its home town of Mountain View in Northern California. It seems to be a pattern.

According to Ben Charny's eWeek blog, "Google's begun testing the network and, in so doing, has discovered it might need to add more WiFi transmitters than originally thought to deliver the coverage and service quality it promised, according to Ellis Burns, the city's economic development manager."

Entrails-reading comments follow, with technically opinionated views offered by people of questionable competence, as usual; but it seems to Andrew Orlowski at The Register that the problem is the old one of "in-building penetration" at microwave frequencies.

The Reg quotes Kimo Crossman, "whose activism helped push the details of San Francisco's Municipal WiFi project TechConnect into the sunlight," as saying that municipal Wi-Fi projects in Tempe, Arizona and St Cloud in Florida also ran into th same problem.

"The need for pilots of municipal Wi-Fi seem beyond prudent," is one comment he makes and also: "San Francisco has additional challenges over Mountain View, with hills, older construction with lead and mesh which significantly reduce penetration of outside signals, and a much higher coverage requirement of 95 per cent outdoors and 90 per cent indoors are significant issues," he says.