Meraki’s PR department sent this email today. I thought I’d pass it along since they had some good points:
Hi Sam,
As you know, the deadline to complete applications for broadband stimulus funding are due this Friday, August 14 and there is much discussion over the best way to fulfill the goal of the stimulus, namely to bring broadband to the underserved and unserved areas of the U.S.
Meraki’s suggestion for the most cost-effective way to meet this goal is to wire up a few key locations within a given area, be it a rural or inner city community, and expand the Internet access using WiFi.
Providing each and every community with access to broadband doesn’t mean that every single home needs to be wired. Many rural communities often use schools, libraries and community centers as meeting places because of their central location. By wiring up a few of these key locations and connecting them via wireless access points, you can essentially create a main street network that covers large areas and serves thousands of people for relatively little cost.
For example, Meraki calculated that to equip every high school in America, all 18,435 institutions and all 14.3 million students, with an 802.11n wireless network would only cost around $276 million – just a fraction of the $7.2 billion available.
I am all for inexpensive broadband. I believe it ought to be a right of every citizen.
How could it happen? There are many approaches. A cheap, long range, broadband wireless system is one approach. Like whitespaces.
Perhaps whitespaces will be supported by actual products by the time the 2nd round of stimulus applications comes around. Wouldn’t that be something.
Seven leading technology companies announced earlier this year that they are working together to facilitate the timely creation and operation of a white spaces database.
The White Spaces Database Group is mapping areas of unused spectrum and enabling devices to verify what frequencies are available based on positional information (likely GPS or cell tower triangulation). The White Spaces Database Group includes Comsearch, Dell, Google Inc., HP, Microsoft, Motorola, and NeuStar.
And if anyone could develop cheap, license-free, 700 MHz WiMAX repeaters, it might be Meraki.
Municipal WiFi made practical.
