Meraki, a wireless mesh equipment maker, has announced a bold plan to create a citywide Wi-Fi cloud in San Francisco that would provide free Internet access. The project relies upon residents setting up solar-powered mesh nodes on their rooftops and repeaters in their homes.
What is Meraki’s “secret” sauce? Here’s what the press release says:
“Meraki’s unique technology creates a wireless network by combining signals from hundreds or thousands of low-power radio repeaters installed on rooftops, balconies and windows, extending WiFi access to city residents in their homes and businesses. Through communication with Meraki central servers and intelligence worked into every repeater, each point in the network is automatically optimized for speed and performance without any maintenance required of users. In the first two square miles of the project in San Francisco, the network identified and worked around more than 20,000 sources of interference and allowed Meraki to deliver almost 1Mbps of access to every user.”
I’m a big fan of Wi-Fi everywhere and am thrilled to see Meraki picking up where EarthLink left off. However, Meraki’s plan is very different from EarthLink’s in that Meraki does not have to go through the city council (and won’t get stuck in San Francisco politics).
How does Meraki plan to create a citywide Wi-Fi network? The network’s backbone consists of hundreds of small solar-powered mesh nodes to be installed on the roofs of homes, apartments and commercial buildings. To extend the network to new neighborhoods, Meraki says they will offer free repeaters to residents. You don’t need a repeater to gain access to the network, according to Meraki, a Wi-Fi access point will do.
Advantages of Meraki’s plan
(1) Does not go through the San Francisco Board of Supervisors (kiss of death for a lot of projects). This alone gives the Meraki project a greater chance of gaining traction quickly.
(2) Relies on grassroots support so it could spread very quickly if hundreds of people install the Meraki mesh nodes and repeaters.
(3) Less expensive, they say, than EarthLink’s plan which uses proprietary mesh equipment. We shall see.
Disadvantages of Meraki’s plan
(1) Requires people to ask permission from hundreds of landlords around the city to mount the solar-powered nodes on rooftops — this could slow down the project. The attractiveness of the original San Francisco plan with EarthLink was that EarthLink needed to negotiate only with one entity.
(2) Not clear who will take down and replace a solar-powered Meraki mesh node if it breaks down. Is Meraki relying on residents to do this (people who are busy and have day jobs and don’t relish the thought of crawling up to the roof)?
(3) Relies on individuals to set up repeaters in their homes. This is similar to the FON model which, on paper, looks brilliant. However, there are a lot of people who have not even taken their FON routers out of the boxes. I have a Fon router in my house, but it took me about 30 minutes to install (and it was not as easy as they said it was going to be). There’s just no incentive for people to set up repeaters. At least with FON, the incentive for you to install the Fon router and share your network is that you get free Wi-Fi access anywhere in the world where there is another person who has also installed a FON router and opened up his or her network.
(4) What about bandwidth? Although the press release says that Meraki can get at least 1 Mbps to every user, I do not know where they are getting all of this bandwidth. Is Meraki tapping into the city’s fiber network? Someone else’s fiber network? Who is paying for access to the fiber network? When hundreds of people log onto the network (especially when the iPhone and iPod Touch become very popular), they will need to provide lots of bandwidth so it’s critical to have a robust fiber infrastructure behind it.
On the whole, I am very pleased to see someone else trying to get Wi-Fi access everywhere in SF. But like any project — constructing a bridge, laying down a network of roads, deploying a FTTH network — the devil is in the details. And as we have seen with any infrastructure project, one needs to be realistic about costs (usually higher than expected) and time to deploy (usually longer than than expected). People should also give it a chance to be tested and tweaked. Nothing is done perfectly the first time, or any time. Networks are always evolving.
Visit Meraki’s Free The Net site:
http://sf.meraki.com/
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