dailywireless.org » Meraki: 80% of SF’s Neighborhoods

Meraki: 80% of SF’s Neighborhoods

Meraki at a press conference with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsome today announced that Meraki’s free citywide wi-fi network has reached 80% of San Francisco’s neighborhoods (although not the population). Meraki says it has established a Wifi presence in 42 of the city’s 52 major neighborhoods.

The private company says it is on track to “unwire” San Francisco by the end of the year.

Meraki also plans to add wireless coverage to dozens of affordable housing and senior centers throughout the city by the end of the year. The company, which is the sole sponsor of the San Francisco network dubbed “Free the Net”, will continue to build out the network in 2009, deepening coverage in each neighborhood.

Meraki says it will have the largest, free public Wi-Fi network anywhere when it is finished. To help expand the network, San Francisco residents and local cafes can register online and receive a free wireless repeater.

Sanjit Biswas, CEO of Meraki, said today the San Francisco network “will serve as true testament to the power and the capability of the wireless innovation our technology represents and the power it has to drastically accelerate Internet connectivity around the world.”

Biswas also announced it will offer wireless connectivity at 12 additional affordable housing complexes in the city to commemorate One Web Day 2008. Those complexes include the Alexander Residence, the Franciscan, Antonia Manor, the Dalt Hotel, the Ambassador and other complexes, all located in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood.

These installations will be completed with the help of SF Connect volunteers next Monday.

Meraki’s technology uses mesh-connected nodes that communicate with each other and report back to a central server which allows the company to manage the entire network.

The Meraki network differs from municipal Wi-Fi networks in that Meraki is footing the bulk of the costs and volunteers do most of the work. Meraki, which competes against Wi-Fi gear makers such as Cisco Systems, Tropos Neworks, and Bel Air, has no plans to replicate its completely free Wi-Fi network in other cities, explains C/Net. Google was an early investor in Meraki, but they have had no further financial involvement with the company.

“Free the Net” is completely independent from Google. An earlier post on Dailywireless got that fact wrong.

The ad model didn’t work out for MetroFi — but who knows what the future holds. Meraki says 20% of their users in San Francisco are now using iPhones. Perhaps residential users will become a secondary market if WiFi phones and MIDs become ubiquitous. There’s a lot to be said about sweat equity. Do it yourself networks might be the future for small communities and housing complexes.

MerakEye.com is a forum for watching Meraki, Open-Mesh & mesh networking developments.

The Meraki is easy to use and maintain and has received high praise from users and operators, but it does operate a proprietary system.

For those who insist on total control with open source software at the heart of it all, there is an alternative from Open-Mesh.

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. Open-Mesh does basically 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 or not.

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”, said Michael Burmeister-Brown, head of Open-Mesh, in a phone conversation with 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.