MuniWireless

Glenn Fleishman has written an analysis of municipal wireless networking, tracing its development from large citywide “free” networks (which did not get built out) to smaller, more targeted networks (Minneapolis, Oklahoma City). He focuses much of the article on mesh vendor Meraki’s strategy: unwiring small neighborhoods, apartment complexes and downtown areas. EarthLink’s pullout from the municipal wireless market, the failiure of wireless ISPs such as Kite Networks and MetroFi, and more importantly, the financial crisis which has drained cities and…

Meraki has just released a cute Wi-Fi Wall Plug which hotel and apartment building managers can install in rooms and apartment units to expand Wi-Fi access throughout their properties. The Wall Plug (pictured below) looks like the Apple Airport Express and costs $179. In addition, Meraki is now marketing a Residential WiFi Pack (which includes Wall Plugs) for less than $5000. The pack is designed to bring wireless access to a 100-unit building with minimum installation hassles and faster time…

Meraki has just introduced a muni wireless Starter Pack for $10,000 per square mile (available until 1 December 2008) with a 60-day money back guarantee for cities or business districts that want to unwire their neighborhoods. Meraki says that setting up a wide-area Wi-Fi network using their equipment is much less expensive than the $25,000 to $100,000 estimated cost (per square mile) using other manufacturers’ gear. I went to the Meraki website and tried to get more information about what…

Like many online publications, I got the Meraki press release whose title reads “MERAKI ANNOUNCES FREE PUBLIC WIFI AVAILABLE IN 80% OF SAN FRANCISCO NEIGHBORHOODS”. When you look at the Meraki map of users (below) you will see that Meraki does not cover 80% of San Francisco at all.

Large areas of the Sunset District have no Meraki network (unless of course you consider 14 people all clumped in one location to be meaningful coverage). Other areas with barely any Meraki…

According to Meraki, the mesh equipment provider, the iPhone now accounts for 20% of devices using the Meraki network in San Francisco, up from 6% a year ago. The company says that 150,000 devices have accessed the network, so that’s a lot of iPhones!

My take: not only are there more iPhones out there, but many people also prefer to use Wi-Fi given the frequent AT&T outages and the slow cellular network, which isn’t really optimized for heavy data use. Indeed…

Not really, says Sascha Meinrath, Research Director for the New America Foundation’s Wireless Future Program and a founder of the Champaign-Urbana Wireless Network. Sascha agrees that Meraki is a good option for people who want to create a wireless network quickly, but they don’t understand that although the hardware seems inexpensive ($49 for the indoor repeater, $149 for the outdoor solar-powered mesh access point), Meraki users could wind up paying much more than they expected:

“Hundreds of projects, organizations, and municipalities…