F2C: Google has Bucket Trucks - Mountain View Municipal Wireless Network

Chris Sacca from Google gave an afternoon talk at Freedom to Connect. I’ve heard a number of presentations by folks from Google and they all start with some gee whiz material.  But this is the first I’d heard anything about the Mountain View wireless network beyond the original press release.

Chris is Head of Special Initiatives at Google and is the person in charge of the municipal wireless network in Mountain View, California.  The title of his presentation: Google has Bucket Trucks.  The first half was general Google stuff and the second half was about the Mountain View network. I don’t have the presentation, but here are my notes:

• The mission:  Organize the worlds info and make it accessible…
• Google's admonition to their staff: don't worry about CPU power, memory, monetization or partner concerns. Instead focus on user experience.
• There are ~5 million terabytes of information in the world.  So far, Google has only indexed ~170 TB - a long way to go.
• Google has 1950 projects running right now - Chris attributed this to their policy of encouraging engineers to spend 20% of their time on their own ideas... 
• Chris showed an interesting diagram about devices for communications – like a “long-tail” diagram only with a truncated tail, to emphasize we have relatively few devices, so far - someone needs to build the additional devices ( but this is not Google's expertise)
• Looking for a world with many, many networks, all interconnected - this is also not Google's expertise even though they are deploying a network in Mountain View).
• Chris says Google is good at:
  1.  Location-based apps that users want (e.g. google local mobile). So far they've had to do this w/o access to location information from any operator.   http://www.google.com/glm/
  2.  Making more money for network operators
  3.  Opening our mouths and convincing others
• To inspire change - just start building

Then Chris described the Mountain View network:

• They are using Tropos equipment.  In a private discussion before his presentation, Chris said they picked Tropos because their credentials included connecting to everything else needed to make the whole network.  He expects other vendors will match these soon.


• The Mount View Network is up for test purposes now.


• 330 radios to cover 11.5 sq miles


• His map showed 330 dots plus 16 larger green dots (mid-tier aggregation to Internet?)


• Three primary distribution points – subscriber gateway aggregation points – connected by point-to-point radio.  The northern most is at Google HQs where the whole system connects to the Internet.

During a very brief Q&A, Chris was asked about privacy.  His answer was fairly wide ranging – it even touched on their China policy.  As with every other Google employee I’ve heard present, or spoken with, there is a clear sense that “doing good” is taken seriously at every level in the company.

 

Comments

[David Kane]

Interesting you should note that Google have to do with out location based information from the operator. This point or gripe was mentioned at the last mobile monday meeting London, with the content providers citing free LBS as a potential way of stimulating content services.

A little plug for my blog below where I comment upon this :-)

http://david-kane.blogspot.com/