Prestonsburg, Kentucky (pop. 4000) is delivering free Wi-Fi service in the center of town for a mere $8500. The secret: they are using Meraki’s inexpensive wireless access points. The city had issued a public tender for its network but the bidders were asking too much money (in some cases over $100,000). Meraki’s equipment is used by in San Francisco and in many developing countries where wireless mesh equipment from mainstream vendors is simply too expensive for the local ISPs.
Rural towns and counties are continuing to set up muni Wi-Fi networks because cable and DSL operators are not interested in delivering service to these areas. They are also terrific places to launch WiMAX service because of the absence of high-speed broadband access. Take our poll (see right-hand side) — do you think WiMAX is more attractive in rural than urban areas?)
UPDATE: Make sure you read this article about Meraki:
Is Meraki as inexpensive and open-source as it seems?
Related stories on rural wireless broadband:
Wi-Fi service as a utility in Tabor, Iowa
Racine County Wi-Fi: providing access where it’s really needed
Craven County, North Carolina goes wireless: rural Wi-Fi connects schools, towns
Cambria County, Pennsylvania launches countywide wireless network
Meraki is great in deploying scalable mesh networks for saturating highly populated area’s. More cities should move away from the money loosing model currently getting deployed in cities and look to this technology for the future.
Billy.
http://www.merakeye.com
This is actually one of the most boneheaded things a municipality can support. Meraki permanently takes away the option of 2.4 GHz.
Complete loss of control over security, reliability, traffic prioritization, spectrum, etc.
What do you do when 802.11y is available in 2 years?
Read this unflattering review of Meraki:
Is Meraki as inexpensive and open-source as it seems?
We have tested Meraki. We had no control over the network and access to the internet through Meraki is arbitrary e.g. depends on the vendor!!
Meraki works, take the units out of the box – mount them up high, or in store windows – done
Anytime that I have had a problem with the system, it turns out to be something else, Meraki is ROCK solid WORKS