MERAKI NETWORKS

[Bruce551]

Meraki Mini Wi-Fi: 2007 Best Tech Computing

$50 gets you a Wi-Fi connection from Meraki Networks. However, Maraki Networks hopes to spark a worldwide Wi-Fi revolution. This wireless router lets a city block share the same Internet connection. Add more Minis, and the network can blanket acres, so instead of all your neighbors paying an ISP, you could let them tap into your connection?

To boost the whole network?s bandwidth, plug any of the Minis into another wired link. With a $150 model of the Mini, you can even charge users via a Website.

Meraki?s founders, backed by Google, based the Meraki Mini on $1,000 commercial units. But they use widely available chips, smart software and cash-earning Google ads to bring massive networks to the masses.

Website: http://meraki.com/

The Meraki website is little geeky, but not impossible to figure out. You can share your internet connection with your neighbors, save some money.

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[Bruce551]

An Article from Scientific American on Meraki Networks.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleid=38462CAE-E7F2-99DF-321E78970AEB35C0

Excerpt:

Hardware

The physical manifestation of the Meraki philosophy, the $50 Mini, is the size of two iPhones stacked on top of one another. It weighs just a few ounces, and if not for the enclosed antenna jutting out of one end, it would look like a basic phone charger. It contains less than $5 worth of components, including a few chips and a radio-frequency transmitter?essentially the same parts in every wireless router.

"If you look at the chip that we use inside," Biswas says, "It's a 180-megahertz MIPS processor?exactly the same processor that was used in those Silicon Graphics workstations that were used to render the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park in the mid '90s."

It's the so-called firmware, or software embedded inside, that makes the Mini unique. Burned into a flash-memory chip, it's eight megabytes of the most refined code ever to grace the guts of a wireless transmitter. This software is so crucial to the global Meraki network that, according to Biswas, when you buy a Meraki you are also buying free firmware updates, rolled out at irregular intervals?for life.

"I think the thing that makes us the most unique," Biswas says, "is that we understand how to build a large network that serves hundreds of users at once. Part of that is packets, but there are other pieces. The network must be able to self-organize."

Setup

As long as each Mini can "see" at least one other Mini (they have to be within 100 feet of one another indoors or within 700 feet in areas where the signal is not impeded by walls or buildings), the network will self-configure. Minis that are actually plugged into the Internet act as routers; the ones that are not act as repeaters, retransmitting the signal of router Minis.

This might sound like a recipe for abysmally slow access, but according to Meraki, a single DSL Internet connection (spread across a mesh network composed of other Minis) can accommodate 50 simultaneous users. The Meraki dashboard, accessible via the Web, allows the administrator of a Meraki network to cap usage for each subscriber or even ban them outright to prevent against abuse (such as a single teen with access to a file-sharing network).

"We've had no problems at all in terms of performance," says Dave Cannard, co-founder of NetEquality, a Portland, Ore., nonprofit that uses Merakis to bring wireless access to low income communities. NetEquality's largest setup includes 350 apartments that use 75 nodes and just four DSL Internet connections.

"We like it because it's very intuitive and easy," Cannard adds. "People just plug it in and it works." Spreading the cost of high-speed Internet connections across multiple users means that each user pays as little as $1 a month for access in addition to a onetime initial set up fee of $25 to cover the cost of the Minis. The units can serve as wireless modems for computers that do not already have wireless cards, although there are cheaper options; among them is a $20 adapter sold by NetEquality.

"The Minis are at a very nice price point," says Michael Mee, one of the principle organizers of SoCal Free Net in San Diego, another nonprofit trying to bring connectivity to low income communities. "Other gear costs the same, but it's not as reliable as the Minis."

Potential Shortcomings

Traditional Internet service providers (ISPs) are skittish about letting their users share their wireless connections, because of the power of shared wireless nets to reduce the number of individual subscribers in apartments and neighborhoods. Both Verizon and Time Warner, neither of which responded to requests for comment, explicitly forbid their users from sharing their Internet connections, even though home wireless routers are often unintentionally left open?visible and without password protection?and therefore become de facto wireless hot spots.

Lesser-known nationwide ISPs, including Speakeasy and bway.net, have no such restrictions. "If our customers buy bandwidth from us," says Joe Plotkin, a free-wireless evangelist at Bway.net, "and they want to share it with neighbors, or publicly, that doesn't make them bad customers."

Once users have connected their networks through appropriate ISPs, the only remaining issues are the physical limitations of the routers. Biswas argues that this is rarely a problem. "Most internet users use very little bandwidth anyway," says Biswas.

I know Khun Thai in Chiang Mai that would like to have internet access, but cannot afford to pay a 650 to 1,000 Baht month ISP fee. Sharing internet connections at low cost would benifit lower income people, helping them to help themselves.

I bet the Thai Gov. will have a project to connect rural villages to the internet. A Thai ISP will get the contract and charge "billions" of Baht install to the system. However, if you used "Meraki Neworks" and local companies the cost to install the wireless network the cost would be a 10th as much.

[Bruce551]

The latest on Meraki Neworks:

Meraki, the cheap Wi-Fi guys, get $20 million

Posted by Michael Kanellos

Meraki, a start-up that hopes to bring cheap Wi-Fi to the emerging world, has raised $20 million in a second round of funding.

The company, which grew out of a Ph.D. thesis at MIT, has created inexpensive routers and a back-end networking service that balances available bandwidth between the routers and users. The end result is that the available bandwidth is used more efficiently, according to Sanjit Biswas, Meraki's CEO and co-founder.

"There are a small number of Internet connections, but they are repeated by a large number of radios" in networks based on the company's equipment, Biswas explained.

Meraki logo

More than 1,000 networks using Meraki's routers have been set up and one of the company's big power users is Google. The company, however, will primarily aim its products and services at customers in India, Latin America, and Africa. The existing infrastructure in these places is fairly minimal, price is a key consideration, and demand is booming.

All these factors work in the company's favor, he said. The company makes routers for indoor and outdoor environments and has also come up with one that gets power from solar panels.

The goal is to provide users with 1-megabit-per-second service in places like Brazil.

To showcase its technology, Meraki will give away approximately 10,000 to 15,000 of its wireless repeaters that, in concert, will create a free wireless network covering San Francisco. San Francisco sports a lot of geographic challenges, and remains home to a lot of Internet power users. Like a lot of emerging nations, San Francisco also suffers from a mind-boggling array of political and bureaucratic problems. (I live here. I know). Earthlink and Google gave up plans to build a municipal Wi-Fi network for the city.

Meraki has an advantage in this department in that it doesn't rely on political approval. It gives or sells repeaters to people, and they erect and manage the network.

Meraki has already issued free repeaters to residents in the Mission, Lower Haight, and Upper Market neighborhoods. Overall, this covers about 2 square miles of the city, and 40,000 people have logged onto the network, said Biswas.

This being San Francisco, there is an inordinate number of iPhones tapping into it. Over 1,000 iPhones have logged on, he said. Users tell Meraki that the speeds are better than the cellular Internet service provided by AT&T.

The existing San Francisco network is served by only "tens of megabits" worth of bandwidth from the Internet, not much in the aggregate. "Not everyone uses it at the same time," said Biswas.

Investors in the second round included existing investors like Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, and Northgate Capital.

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