Google Free Wi-Fi NYC: Chelsea Neighborhood Gets Free Internet Thanks to Tech Giant

Residents of New York City's Chelsea neighborhood are finding it easier and cheaper to get online, thanks to Google.

On Tuesday, the tech giant announced it was offering free outdoor wi-fi blanketing the entire area for at least two years, in an opening ceremony attended by local officials, including New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and New York Senator Chuck Schumer.

"Google, which houses most of its 3,000 New York employees in a massive building on lower Eighth Avenue, has invested about $75,000 to install the broadest wireless network that is open to the public in any neighborhood in the city," writes The New York Times.

The area, which is bounded by Gansevoort Street on the south and 19th Street on the north, Eighth Avenue on the east and the West Side Highway along the Hudson River, includes Google's New York headquarters, which houses about 3,000 of the company's workers.

"Google is proud to provide free Wi-Fi in the neighborhood we have called home for over six years," said Ben Fried, Google's chief information officer, who attended the ceremony. "This network will not only be a resource for the 2,000+ residents of the Fulton Houses, it will also serve the 5,000+ student population of Chelsea as well as the hundreds of workers, retail customers and tourists who visit our neighborhood every day."

Neither the public nor the city are chipping in funding for the project.

"In New York, Google and the Chelsea Improvement Company are paying for the network, which cost $115,000 to set up and will cost $45,000 a year to operate," reported CBS News. "Wi-Fi, which allows for a connection to the Internet without the use of cellular service, would be free outdoors and in some indoor spaces such as a senior center."

Of course, as long as users can get a signal, they are free to use the wi-fi indoors. Most wi-fi networks will penetrate exterior walls.

Bloomberg has stated previously that he would like the entire city to eventually have free wi-fi.

"New York is determined to become the world's leading digital city, and universal access to high-speed Internet is one of the core building blocks of that vision," Bloomberg said in a statement. "Thanks to Google, free wi-fi across this part of Chelsea takes us another step closer to that goal."

While Google has made waves in the broadband market with the introduction of high speed internet options in select cities, this initiative is not part of that Google Fiber project.