Meraki is announcing today that it has partnered with the city of San Francisco to provide free wireless internet access to affordable housing complexes in the city.
In a press conference with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom today, Sanjit Biswas, founder and CEO of Meraki, will showcase two affordable housing developments that it has unwired.
Earlier this year, Meraki announced its plan to blanket all of San Francisco with free wireless internet access by the end of 2008. Meraki’s San Francisco network “Free the Net” (map) is rapidly expanding throughout the city. Its partnership with the city is a part of a longer term plan to reach some of the communities which have historically not had internet access.
Residents in those neighborhoods, as well as those in the Mission, Alamo Square Hayes Valley, Nob Hill, Russian Hill and the Castro, can now sign up at http://sf.meraki.com. Meraki is providing this free access as it tests its ability to bring wireless access to an entire city.
Meraki is funding the entire cost for establishing the network across the city, including affordable housing communities. The company is funding “Free the Net” in order to demonstrate to other communities around the world that Meraki technology can be used to create city-wide wireless networks at a fraction of current costs.
No public funds will be used to build the Meraki wireless network in San Francisco. Their WiFi network, using inexpensive WiFi repeaters, is supported with advertising. Though Meraki has been generous enough to donate the equipment, the deployment of the network relies heavily on volunteers.
Volunteers host an outdoor repeater on a roof or balcony. A gateway is a Meraki device that is directly connected to a Meraki-sponsored DSL line, which is supplied without charge. A repeater is a Meraki device that repeats the wireless signal but is not directly plugged into an Internet source. Every Meraki network is plugged into a powerful back-end system hosted at their datacenters, which handles network analysis and advertising insertion.
City-wide Wi-Fi networks have been a bust in many cities and communities, notes GigaOm’s Katie Fehrenbacher, but Meraki’s type of very low-cost, ad-hoc networks seems to be best suited for the technology. For just a few million, a company like Meraki can slowly add localized Wi-Fi hotspots in communities that actively want and will use the technology.
Grassroots efforts have proven modestly successful in the past. Portland’s Personal Telco Project, among the better known community-based organizations, built a network from the ground up, using volunteers, Linksys or similar Wi-Fi routers reflashed with the WiFiDog software, and shared DSL.
They unwired the Mississippi neighborhood in north Portland (video above), with backhaul contributed by local providers like Stephouse Networks. PTP president Michael Weinberg sees a synergy between community efforts and municipal policy goals. “What I’d like to see Portland do is get on the viral side of this,” he says. “There are hundreds of thousands of broadband connections in the city. We could unwire Portland tomorrow if enough people got on board.
Non-profit organizations, such as Net Equality (now a part of One Economy), utilized Meraki to provide cheap or free internet access for low income housing. They were left twisting in the wind, however, when Meraki changed their direction, boosting the price to $99 for the repeater, and incorporating an advertising model.
Enter Michael Burmeister-Brown (right), the co-founder of NetEquality and the developer of the Dashboard Software that made managing dozens, even hundreds, of Meraki repeaters fast, easy and cost/effective.
Michael Burmeister-Brown recently announced a new product and company called Open-Mesh. It is designed to fill the void left by Meraki.
Open-Mesh does everything the original Meraki did — and more:
- It’s inexpensive. Open-Mesh WiFi repeaters cost $49 each or $39.95 (qty 20)
- It’s Ad free. Open-Mesh promises they will never push ads into your networks. You decide what, if any, content you want to display.
- It’s 100% open source and deployed on top of OpenWRT. You can change anything.
- You can re-flash the firmware if you want.
- The Dashboard management system provides free administration, alerting and mapping. It allows you to configure the ESSID, splash page, passwords, and Bandwith allocation of your networks.
- The devices auto-configure. It’s simple to create a neighborhood or apartment network. You don’t need to use their management system if you don’t want to.
Unlike Meraki and FON, their architecture is 100% open source. You can re-flash the firmware if you want. Put up a new splash page. Use their free management software (below) — or not.
The small mini-routers ($49) come pre-flashed with ROBIN open-source mesh firmware. It is ready to plug in and use. No configuration necessary.
You plug one into your DSL or other Internet connection and put additional mini-routers where you want Internet access to extend the WiFi range (each router should be within 100 feet of another router). They like Covad because they support WiFi sharing but other broadband providers can be used. Open-Mesh doesn’t have a business relationship with broadband providers
The router comes with a 2dbi antenna and Ethernet cable to connect to your DSL or computer. It uses the same Atheros chipset used in the Meraki.
ROBIN (ROuting Batman Inside) is an Open Source mesh network project, deployed on top of OpenWRT. It uses the BATMAN routing algorithm (Better Approach to Mobile Ad-hoc Networking) for multi-hop ad-hoc mesh networks.
What’s the business plan for Open-Mesh?
“We’re not trying to get rich”, explained Michael Burmeister-Brown to DailyWireless. “We hope other companies and manufacturers will pick up on the open source ROBIN sofware and include it in their hardware”, explained Burmeister-Brown.
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