Google and the city of Council Bluffs are announcing the launch of a free Wi-Fi Network. This marks the first free high-speed wireless internet network for the city and the first Wi-Fi initiative in Council Bluffs.

The Council Bluffs Free Wi-Fi Network gives free access to the Internet to anyone in and around several Council Bluffs areas: Downtown Council Bluffs and 100 Broadway District, Mid America Center, and the Harvey Recreational Complex. Once users agree to the terms of service, they will be able to surf the web freely.

For a Google-provided map of the coverage area, click here.

A celebration is planned for the evening of October 26 on the 100 Block of Broadway from 6-8 pm. The public is invited to learn about the free Wi-Fi network and the collaboration between Google and the city.

Live music, food, beverages, and Google product demonstrations will be a part of the evening celebration.

Google financed the construction of the Wi-Fi Network through a $154,462 grant, and the city incurred no charges. Google has agreed to provide free Wi-Fi to the City of Council Bluffs for three years, and the City will maintain the network.

It's not everyday you find someone like Donna Miller. See Miller lives across the street in the apartments; she pulls weeds, picks up trash around Bayliss Park. Miller says, "I do it every day, pretty much every day just to do something and if I have peanuts, I feed the squirrels."

Miller is also getting a new laptop later this month and will be able to surf the web at her favorite park but she hopes others will join her. Miller says, "There are a lot of kids down here with their cell phones, wireless cell phones, working with them and they enjoy it down here."

Free Wi-Fi and a corporation's investment to the Council Bluffs area, that's music to small business owner Sean Lidgett's ears. Lidgett’s says, "I mean they didn't just come in and build a building, so they are actually giving back to the community."

Lidgett's special niche market of guitars, especially custom orders, doesn't string in a lot of walk-in business. Lidgett says, "We send them to New York, Los Angeles and we do a lot of online business, too."

They do business through Lidgett Music's web page and sites like E-Bay, so any local competitive edge is a tune worth humming along to. Lidgett says, "Anything that we get to do first, I think is a positive thing for the image of Council Bluffs, which we are trying to change, we've stuck it out here, we've thought about moving to Omaha for years, we've seen this area come around, I own the building and with everyone else on the block doing their part to fix up their buildings, it's been kind of the key thing that keeps us here."

One example where we could see the biggest benefit to this 3 year spans would be at events at the Mid-America Center. A lot of people at events or concerts there tend to get on Facebook or Twitter on their phones which we've seen can bog down a cellular network. If a Wi-Fi network is set up there, as a test site, Google would gauge how much data it could hold.