Sydney Morning Herald: “Facebookers net wi-fi”
Sydney Morning Herald already picked up Meraki earlier in the year. But now they also pick up Free Sydney Wireless, and interviewed yours truly…
“Frustrated by the NSW Government’s stalled free wi-fi project, a group of Facebookers have decided to start their own.”
“Free Sydney Wireless’ next recruiting drive will be in March at Barcamp, an informal web developers’ get-together. “We will try to set up a wireless net at Barcamp using Merakis, in the hope that it spurs more people to install their own Meraki.”
Read all at SMH.com.au
If you want to get in touch, please register and leave a comment. Thanks!
If you’re interested in joining the fun (get a Meraki), head over to the Facebook group and look into the group buy post (but you do need a Facebook account – try to sort that out with an open forum or wiki soon).
Hi,
I have been interested in free community wifi ever since I read “Someone comes to town, someone leaves town” by Cory Doctorow (http://craphound.com/someone). After I read the SMH story I spent the afternoon reading up on the Meraki gear.
One thing that struck me was how locked in you get to the company, all network administration etc goes through their servers. No word if they sell your network information to third parties(number of nodes, number of users, locations etc). What happens if the company goes belly up? Or decides to increase fees or start charging on a per node/user basis? From what I have read they changed their structure recently without a word to their existing customers, just an email after the fact saying ‘check our website’. That move seems to have got a lot of people offside.
One thing that rubbed me the wrong way was the advertising bar. Nowhere on their site do they actually mention that they pump google ads through to your network. All they say is that the administrators can use it for community announcements and promotions etc, never that they have to share it with external ads. Now if the network operator got the proceeds from the google ads, that would be alright, but once again, not mentioned on their site.
The network doesn’t seem all that secure either. Anybody on the network can ssh into any node and wreak havoc, the username/passwords are on the Meraki site and there is no way to change them from the default.
It seems to me that this area is screaming out for a completey open source solution, from the server software to the router firmware, heck, even the hardware design for the routers. There are groups out there working towards this goal, see http://opensourcemesh.org . One group (http://open-mesh.com) seem very close, They have plans to open their server software soon.
Having said all that, the Meraki units look to be really cool little devices, and I would love to grab a couple to play with. Are there plans for another group buy? (sorry, I don’t do facebook.)
Macca