GigaOM's Katie Fehrenbacher received an email invitation last week welcoming her to try out Google’s Mountain View Wi-Fi network as one of the trusted testers.

Katie says - "So I’m posting this from Rengstorff Park in Mountain View and the connection is pretty good: between 2 and 3 bars out of 4 on my Mac, works well enough from here. I might drive around a bit and follow the nifty map that Google set up and update this post later. I won’t divulge how to get onto the network, but trust me it’s a no-brainer, even though right now trusted testers can’t see the SSID number. Well, looks like the network is running well enough for now, but Google’s keeping the trusted tester population small to work out all the bugs."

She also mentions that her connection was not secure because she had not downloaded Google’s VPN client, like the email invite had suggested. The email says “Simply visit »wifi.google.com/download.html to download Google Secure Access and use it with Google WiFi. Note that you will only be able to download the Google Secure Access VPN client when associated with the Google Wi-Fi network – the download page will not work from any other Internet connection.”