Dannic, The Prince of Cats

Posted by Dannic on March 28th, 2006 in General

Yep, you heard it right. There has been some talk about it for quite a while now. Google is planning on giving out free wireless access. There is a catch though

Dawn notes that the patent application says that Wi-Fi Internet access would be provided freely to customers in exchange for their agreement to receiving ads on their devices.

Russell Shaw at ZDNet goes a little more into the detail on the patents they have subscribed for. But the gist of the deal is that they will be providing free hotspots to those who will accept their terms.

It kind of goes back to the days of Opera when it had advertisements in the browser. Google applied for a patent which will basicly serve you an advertisement for using their WiFi service.

Big difference here is that Google is offering something which alot of people would like. Free WiFi. Opera failed because it was forcing you to view ads on a browser that you didn’t really need or want. It was just better than IE(except for the ads).

I am guessing that once this starts, there will be lots of companies which currently provide this service for a fee starting to complain about Google being similiar to Microsoft.

This probably will take some time to come out to my area(several years) but you can probably expect to see it in some major cities soon. Especially on the west coast.