Meraki, the grassroots wireless mesh networking company, today announced the Main Street WiFi Starter Pack to assist any town or business district deploy broadband wireless access across a full square mile.
The new Main Street WiFi kit includes the technology and support to make it easy for cities and towns to deploy WiFi across approximately 1 square mile for less than $10,000. That’s a fraction of the cost of other solutions in the market. Tropos, a leading vendor in the municipal wireless space, says it typically costs $65,000/square mile to provide municipal WiFi.
For cities looking for someone to deploy or manage the solution on their behalf, Meraki will introduce them to a certified partner to handle the roll out.
- Prestonsburg, KY deployed a Meraki network to supply WiFi to the city and outlying valleys. Deployed by a non technical city executive, the network was easy to set up and has netted great results — restaurants, national retailers and other businesses have moved into the city’s core since deployment.
- Wireless Ypsi says every person and every business is a part owner in their network. We do that by having them pay for the radio that goes into the window. And we reward them by providing a link and graphic and for those that also provide bandwidth, they get banner advertising on the Wireless Ypsi service.
- Hillsboro-Wifi.com is the work of one guy, Mike Boyd, who bought a bunch of Merakis and is single handedly building a network by talking to businesses like Milepost 5, a two acre multi-functional development for creatives located near Portland, Oregon.
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.
Related Dailywireless stories include; Meraki: Simple, Reliable & (almost) as Cheap, How (and Why) to Flash Your Access Point, Meraki Nets in SF and Portland, Meraki and San Francisco Partner for WiFi, Universal Access to All Human Knowledge – at 100Mbps – Free, and The Open-Mesh Revolution.
