Mayor Ed Lee announces free wifi partnership with Google (photo: TechCrunch)TechCrunch reported yesterday that Google has made a $600k gift to the city to provide free wifi to over 30 of San Francisco's Parks and Recreation Centers including Castro area parks Duboce Park, Dolores Park and the Eureka Valley Recreation Center. The gift is set to cover the installation and maintenance of the network for two years. Local officials will have that long to figure out how to budget for and maintain the network thereafter. Pending approvals, installations could start in November and be done by April 2014.
Plans to create and maintain free city-wide wifi access have stuttered in the past. According to Wikipedia, San Francisco Municipal Wireless, the network originally proposed by San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom in 2004, was scrapped in 2007 after bid winner Earthlink decided they could not justify the financial business model.
As we reported in June, AT&T is also planning a free wifi network, but for the Market Street corridor. AT&T has not given a date for when the project will be completed, but once it is, the free access will be available for 5 years.
While coverage for all of San Francisco is still a ways off, offering free wifi access in public places like parks a rec centers is a good step in the right direction to making the Internet accessible to all.
