Nestled within the Silicon Valley landscape, residents of Mountain View, California, enjoy free wireless internet, thanks to the hometown hero Google. Launched August 15, the Google Wi-Fi service uses approximately 380 access points, spread across city light poles and volunteered rooftops, to cover nearly all of Mountain View’s 12.2 square miles in an 802.11b/g-compatible spectrum.

While Google caps the network at speeds of 1 Mbps for upload and download, the company takes a decidedly hands-off approach to limiting users’ ability to access all kinds of content.  Anything’s fair game when you’re connected to the “GoogleWiFi” SSID, save for any outgoing transmissions on port 25.  Google blocks the often-used route for e-mail in an effort to discourage spam.

“We, as a company, support net neutrality in the fullest and we’re going to apply those principles here,” said Chris Sacca, Google’s head of special initiatives.

The only barrier between your laptop and complete, unrestricted, Google-given access to the Internet is a login screen.  You’re required to have a Google account before you can hop online. Put the privacy flag back down, though; Google doesn’t track your web movements.

Google only collects four pieces of information from any Wi-Fi user: the MAC address of the machine joining the network, the specific access point to which its attaching, how long it’s ultimately attached for, and the amount of data that was transferred during the session.

“The network doesn’t really have that much information,” Mr. Sacca added.

Ultimately, the privacy question becomes a matter of trust between you and Google.  However, Red Herring did get a chance to test Google’s claims of accessibility.  Before we could begin, we spent nearly 10 minutes driving around Mountain View to find a working access point (hint: anything under 20 to 30 percent connectivity doesn’t really work).

We eventually found a sweet spot, and were treated to the Google login page within seconds.  After a brief user name/password exchange, we were on.  We started by running a quick bandwidth test, courtesy of speedtest.net.  The results were pleasing:  our download speed on the San Francsico test server hovered around 1,000-1,100 Kbps, and our upload speed nearly hit 900 Kbps over the three successive tries.  Network latency was an enjoyable 36 milliseconds.

While our download of popular BitTorrent client Azureus wasn’t nearly as fast as it is on a cable modem or in the office, the file cruised in without connection interruptions or any other difficulty.  We installed it, headed over to torrentspy.com, and picked a file with a good chunk of seeding clients as a test download.

Red Herring