Google offers a nice birthday present to Om Malik: free Wifi in SF

Essentially confirming a story Om had been writing about for a long time: the GoogleNet. According to his latest piece, Google has responded to an RFP to Wifi-enable the city:

Google officials say San Francisco residents (and visitors) will enjoy a free 300 kilobits per second, always on connection anywhere in the city. As part of its proposal, the company says it will be offering wholesale access to other service providers, who will offer higher throughput connections to their customers. Google says it plans to use its own authentication services. The company is going to use San Diego-based WFI, a cellular network builder company to build out the WiFi network.

As a prospective user of the service, I find this news interesting – and so are the implications: free phone calls, ubiquitous access to the Net from my Tablet PC, no need to print maps in advance,… Has someone figured out a hand-off mechanism across access points yet ?

Happy Birthday Om!

The SF Chronicle has published a detailed write-up on the RFP sponsored by SF Mayor Gavin Newsom.  Amusingly, I bookmarked yesterday a post from Chris Sacca, the Googler in charge of the project, who wrote about the best way for companies to engage with him/Google.