Santa Clara ready for wireless
The Bay Area is peppered with Wi-Fi hot spots: SBC Park, Union Square, countless hotels and cafes. Some even cover several blocks.
But now a Mountain View startup plans to connect an entire city with the wireless Internet equipment, allowing anyone in the city limits of Santa Clara to surf the Net at lightning fast speeds for $20 to $30 per month.
MetroFi Inc., which has kept a low profile until now, plans to begin service in half the city, including most of the city's 40,000 homes, by this summer and finish the 20-square-mile network later this year -- making it one of the largest public Wi-Fi networks in the country.
"We're basically changing the landscape,'' said Chuck Haas, MetroFi's CEO and co-founder, who is already well known in Silicon Valley for helping to start Covad Communications, a DSL Internet provider based in Santa Clara that survived the dot-com bust.
A handful of other small communities already have citywide networks, but the concept is still new. Syndeo Group recently installed a Wi-Fi network covering 13 square miles in Lafayette, a rural area in Southern Louisiana. And Aiirmesh Communications is building a wireless network in the Los Angeles suburb of Cerritos, which has 50,000 residents and measures close to 9 square miles. (San Mateo's Tropos Networks supplied the equipment.)
