MuniWireless

While Naperville, Illinois has said no to free Wi-Fi, San Francisco is forging ahead, this time riding on the coattails of Meraki, a Mountain View based company, whose goal is to cover the city with free Wi-Fi access. Meraki has begun providing free Wi-Fi service to the Altamont Hotel and Dunleavy Plaza, two of the city’s low-income housing projects. They plan to extend coverage to other areas in the city. Already parts of the Mission, Noe Valley and Bernal Heights are said to have Wi-Fi coverage, thanks to Meraki’s Free The Net initiative. San Francisco mayor, Gavin Newsom, who is never shy about grabbing every opportunity he can to erase memories about the city’s EarthLink fiasco, appeared with Sanjit Biswas, founder of Meraki, at the Altamont Hotel and Valencia Gardens to announce the “unwiring” of the city.

Since Meraki is funding the entire citywide Wi-Fi project to prove that creating a giant Wi-Fi network can be done at low cost, San Francisco is more than happy to be a test case. After all, it’s never fun having to use public funds for wireless infrastructure. Why not let someone else do it (shades of EarthLink)? Only this time, there’s no pesky Board of Supervisors getting in the way. Of course, this being partly a grassroots initiative (which means you and I need to crawl up to our roofs to install Meraki’s wireless nodes after getting the landlord’s permission, fingers crossed, and taking them down for repairs, again fingers crossed), it’s much faster, easier and cheaper to set up.

Meraki sells wireless mesh equipment that individuals and businesses can install on rooftops and on their premises to provide Wi-Fi service, free and paid. The Meraki Mini (indoor) sells for $150 while the Meraki Outdoor goes for $200, both of which are very inexpensive and rather stylish, compared to other mesh vendors’ equipment. For businesses and individuals that want to charge for Wi-Fi access, Meraki gets a 20 percent cut — also known as a “transaction fee” (this model is similar to FON’s). I suspect Meraki makes far more money selling their gear than getting a cut out of Wi-Fi service revenues. Early this year, Meraki announced that they received $20 million from Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, Northgate Capital and other existing investors so they have a nice financial cushion to sit on while they “free the Net”.

Those data hungry San Franciscans and their terabytes

According to Meraki, “San Francisco residents have transferred more than 25 terabytes of data on the Meraki network and activity on the network has increased 120% since January of this year.”

I can’t wait to see how much that data traffic will increase when more San Franciscans get the new 3G iPhone (although I’m sure the residents of the Altamont Hotel, Valencia Gardens and Dunleavy Plaza won’t be queueing at the Apple store on July 11 when the 3G iPhone goes on sale).

Wi-Fi or 3G?

I continue to believe that there will be a lot of demand for Wi-Fi access outdoors across a city because more people will be walking around with portable Wi-Fi devices like the iPhone. I am amazed at how many people in SF have iPhones (the first version) and I’m sure they’ll all be upgrading.

Indeed, this week, to the delight of many gadget freaks, Apple released the new 3G iPhone. You might say that people will just use the 3G cellular connection but that has two serious issues: (a) speed and (b) caps of data uploading and downloading. Although Steve Jobs said in this keynote speech at the WWDC in San Francisco that 3G speeds are approaching Wi-Fi, that occurs only in an ideal scenario where very few people are using the cellular network for data transfers. What happens when more people go on the network? And don’t forget that cellular operators will charge you a lot of money if you exceed the data cap on your plan. For people coming from other countries, there are significant roaming charges to take into account.

Nevertheless, I am pleased to see Meraki going forward with their plans. When I come to San Francisco at the end of June and get a 3G iPhone, I will hopefully be connected to lots of free Wi-Fi, happily uploading, downloading, doing Google searches and whatever else people do with these devices.

Related posts:

1. Meraki does not have 80% of San Francisco covered with free Wi-Fi
2. Meraki SF Wi-Fi network shows giant increase in iPhone use
3. Meraki enables free public Wi-Fi in San Francisco