It actually appears that GoogleWifi has come to middle earth.

Are they worried about people using it to hack things? Do you have to somehow be authenticated?

Yes you do have to authenticate, although you don’t appear to need to authenticate as you, so I’m not sure what that’s accomplishing for now.

One important item: you cannot send SMTP traffic from Google WiFi. Understandable, but very sad for us archaic POP3 users… I carefully chisel my email onto stone packets and then hold them up in the air, waiting for the network to come and take them. But it never does. It never does.

Amusingly, I was able to use Google’s WiFi on a speeding train in mountain view… I was able to carry on an IM chat for almost a mile as it hopped from base station to base station, from the MV Castro Street station almost to San Antonio Station.

You only need a gmail account. Speed is reasonable but not as fast as my “middle earth wireless mesh network.”