Comments on: GoogleFi in Mountain View, MetroFi in San Jose

By: tomhiggins

tomhiggins — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 17:37:02 +0000

Metrofi has Portland under its belt? Hardly.

http://unwirepdx-watch.org/

Its safe to day Metrofi has a long way to go before it can claim to have met the original benchmarks that were set out for it.

Another thing to factor into all this, there are places like Portland were there are existing community wireless efforts going on. In Portland there are over 100+ spots to get real free community driven wireless networking . With Metrofi two laptops sitting near each other can not even see each other to share services, photos, etc etc.

A network that offers you the chance to be part of a community is a thing worth using/supporting, a network that uses you as a billboard revenue stream or tiered pay user fee might work for places without alternatives but here in Portland its as useful as a glory hole in an elevator.

Just my 2cents

-tomhiggins

By: Vivek

Vivek — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 20:06:56 +0000

How would you tweak your SMTP server to send email when connected to metrofi? been having the same issue…I know it's not a tech support site but since you mentioned it I thought I'd ask…

By: Andrew

Andrew — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 22:45:37 +0000

I never expected to get FREE water or electricity from the local government. In fact, that's where most city/local government get most their revenue from.

What gives??

By: Om Malik

Om Malik — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 14:28:38 +0000

It seems like they are putting a network in place in San Jose as well. The SSID said it was a "BETA" network. Still the signal was awesome.

By: Richard Crowley

Richard Crowley — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 14:25:04 +0000

Looks like they've reduced the size of the banner at the top. Last week it was a whopping 93 pixels tall, which was just too much. Glad to hear they're continuing to tweak it. I live in Sunnyvale and was surprised to see you talking about it in San Jose - that's quite a range for their beta test.