Early days
What happens when a group of gadget loving web geeks get inspired? They start a quiet revolution in their backyard. That’s what happened after Mark Pesce’s “Mob rules” keynote presentation at Web Directions South late last year, where he described people as the network, and presented the little Meraki’s, allowing you to easily share your internet connection. These $US49 ($55) wireless devices offer the ability to create wi-fi mesh networks that link Meraki to Meraki (as a repeater) until the devices find a gateway with an internet connection. That’s what sets it apart from most other wireless routers. Meraki has its roots at MIT, and are as such the commercial implementation of the MIT Roofnet mesh routing protocol. They are cheap, offer reliable performance and are easy to use. They need very little end user configuration, which is handled through a back-end management/monitoring system hosted at Meraki.
Of course you could open up any regular wireless router too, but most of them miss the user management offered by Meraki. It provides basic system statistics, connected MAC addresses and computer names, and bandwidth usage. In its Standard edition it offers bandwidth throttling and you can block any abusive users. On the Pro edition you can set different tiers with different limits.
But why open your wireless network to begin with? Didn’t we all learn to use WEP at first (which was broken pretty quickly) and now WPA2? As security guru Bruce Schneier (CTO of BT Counterpane) wrote in the January edition of Wired, it’s basic politeness, it’s the neighbourly thing to do. In his “Steal This Wi-Fi / My Open Wireless Network” article he gives his thoughts on open and secured wi-fi and explains why his wireless network is open for everyone to use, and has since generated a lot of controversy. It comes down to the fact that your own pc needs to be secure to begin with. Of course the nay-sayers have valid points too, about leaching, illegal downloads, liability, and those are probably the biggest hurdles in setting up a community driven, free wireless network. Free for people to use occasionally, paid for by me, sharing my monthly bandwidth allowance.
But Meraki offers both options, so you have an open network section, and for yourself you can use the WPA2 enabled private section. It also has a feature to block all traffic going to the local LAN, to alleviate people’s concerns about “guests” being able to connect to the people’s private LANs.
In the end, Meraki’s are a means to an end. There are other options available (Fon, Open-Mesh), which miss some of Meraki’s features or are not mature enough. Meraki’s run on Linux and are pretty hackable (“We would like to encourage you to play with this platform and add your own features to it”). You can SSH into it and add iptables rules if required. And if you’re willing to void the warranty, you can replace it’s firmware with a more secure, more open version like ROBIN.
It’s early days. You don’t change things by doing nothing.
Bruce Schneier: My Open Network