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I think the key is that wired networks were ideal in the situation where customers would pay off the investment. Wireless is way cheaper - one station could be

I think the key is that wired networks were ideal in the situation where customers would pay off the investment. Wireless is way cheaper - one station could be 20+ people and take far less investment upfront.

XorNot 13y ago
This is not really borne out in the economics. Wireless is only cheaper if you have a big wired trunk line somewhere you can drop a tower on. It's not cheaper if you have to build that trunk line, and the latency and equipment start getting costly when you're looking at going tower-to-tower over a long distance, since with a single fiber you can run over 100km before you need another relay (and carry a lot more data). Where this initiative by Google works is getting the rest of the world onto the internet somehow, and profiting off being the base-level service provider. Which would be quite a thing - a world where everyone could send some packet data at any time, would be very different to today where even leaving my house raises serious questions about how online I maybe over the next 48 hours.