Courtesy of Google Offers, numerous New York City subway stations will be receiving free Wi-Fi via Boingo. The idea is to provide the Wi-Fi to customers with an advertising subtext that permits local businesses to push marketing spiels to wireless users in order to direct them to their stores and offer them exclusive deals. The promotion has been offered by Boingo to six subway stations and 200 hotzones throughout Manhattan on a trial basis from today until September 6^th.

According to all reports, even if customers aren’t interested in the advertising—that is, they skip over the screen showing the deals—they will still receive free, unrestricted access to the wireless and be able to so surf on their way while they’re waiting for subway cars to whisk them away to their final destination. This could be an excellent service for many of the Wi-Fi enabled devices such as tablets that many people carry in lieu of smartphones for gaming, communication, and information retrieval.

This is part of a broader project by Google to add free Wi-Fi infrastructure to public areas including malls in cities such as San Francisco, Los Angeles, Tampa and Seattle.

“Google Offers and Boingo want to help New Yorkers get to the fun part faster, whether that is an amazing deal on dinner and a movie, or a quality Wi-Fi connection to their email or the latest viral video,” said Dawn Callahan, vice president of consumer marketing for Boingo Wireless. “Free Wi-Fi sponsored by Google Offers makes it easy for everyone to get their Internet on this summer via Boingo’s network across Manhattan.”

Free Wi-Fi Helps Local Businesses and Eases Discomfort of Travellers

The idea of opening up infrastructure services such as wireless to customers for free is something that has always caught my attention. In fact, it was a hugely contentious issue about what wireless company would capably deliver a similar product to the 2012 Olympics. We’ve seen free wireless hit snags before, especially last-mile wireless, for legal and social reasons or just plain pettiness—and even once we saw it create a controversy because homeless people were being used as hotspots at SXSW 2012. The idea of free wireless with marketing or built-in employees may still be sound; but perhaps it’s the implementation that’s causing many of the failures.

A great number of coffee houses and restaurants offer free wireless to customers (and sometimes as an incentive) but many of them are leashed to for-pay services or sign-up services that instantly turn people like me off them.

However, if I receive free Wi-Fi from a location that I commonly congregate because I must—say a bus station, subway, or mall—and part of the free wireless tells me about the sandwich of the day at the local café I’m willing to suffer that. As long as the advertising is the gateway and not an interruption I often find myself forgiving advertising for its intrusion into my life; better yet, if that advertising leads me to a local business that I would be patronizing anyway because of its proximity I might even thank the advertisement for leading me there.