It's even less hard to believe when you look at what much smaller companies are doing in this department. Rovio (maker of Angry Birds) already provides free Wif

It's even less hard to believe when you look at what much smaller companies are doing in this department. Rovio (maker of Angry Birds) already provides free Wifi to a larger area of downtown Helsinki than Google is rolling out here, and they're a company that is 1/300 the size of Google (measured by revenue). That hasn't exactly bankrupted Rovio, so it's plausible that, to a first-order approximation, Google could provide free wifi to about 300 U.S. downtowns, if they really wanted to, without stretching themselves that far.