I struggle with my wireless router on a daily basis. It is old and my laptop is new, and they hate each other like humans would. As usual, the laptop wouldn’t find the router sitting two feet away but found nine other local wifi routers broadcasting a signal. I was stunned that one of those belongs to Google.
I shouldn’t be surprised. After all, I live in Mountain View, home of Google and their long expected wifi hotspot experiment. But I was. I’m now using it temporarily until I find a good deal on a new router.
I posted a screenshot to Flickr of the first page my browser sees when using their service:
They let users sign up for a new account without forcing them to give cell numbers. They’re missing a link to their privacy policy which says a lot to me. I haven’t bothered to search for it, but I’m sure they reserve the right to mine my traffic history to target ads to me. I don’t mind since I don’t use their services much while I’m logged in; there just isn’t much value in that to me yet.
Update:Â The free G-wifi is pretty zippy. They provide a free VPN to go with the free wifi access. However turning on the VPN brings the speed to a snails pace.