Happy Anniversary Google WiFi - Now, Show Me the Money at WLAN Book.com

August 27th, 2007

Happy Anniversary Google WiFi – Now, Show Me the Money

by Zaib Kaleem

Google’s Mountain View WiFi network celebrated its first anniversary and they posted several interesting data points about the network.

400+ mesh routers
12 square mile coverage and 25,000 homes
15,000 unique users per month
300 gigabytes per day (has grown 10% a month since beginning of 2007)
100 distinct types of WiFi devices
95 percent of the mesh routers being used everyday

While the numbers above are interesting they are not very impressive. A few quick calculations results in below.

Megabytes Per User Per Day

Using 300 gigabytes per day x 30 days/month = 9000 gigabytes per month

(9000 gigabytes/month) / (15,000 users/month) = 600 megabytes/month per user = 20 megabytes per day/user

Kbps Per User Per Day (assume one hour session)

Assuming that the per user usage was completed in a one hour per day (20 megabytes per hour) / (3600 seconds/hour) = 555.55 bytes/second = 44.44 kbps

Now if we had data on the cost of equipment and cost of running the network it would be easy to determine if it makes more sense to give away EVDO/cellular data cards and service for free or to build WiFi municipal networks.

I wonder if Google has crunched numbers like above and already knows the answer?

Additional data points that would be nice to know are below.

Other devices in network architecture (e.g. point-to-point links, point-to-multipoint links, switches, routers, firewalls, servers)
Cost of hardware
Cost to install hardware
ISP/bandwidth cost
Number of full time employees (FTEs) maintaining network
Types of applications (e.g. HTTP, FTP, email, VoIP)
Time on network per user per day
Amount of data per user per day
Gigabytes of traffic to/from Internet vs. gigabytes of WiFi traffic
Total network capacity (user, gigabytes per day)