What’s Wrong with Meraki?
Sasha Meinrath ponders about what’s wrong with Meraki: “Black Box Technologies, Lock-In, & Hidden Costs“.
Hundreds of projects, organizations, and municipalities are rolling out Meraki-based networks, yet few seem to understand that they’re buying a bundled service not just a piece of hardware. Over time, these initiatives will end up paying an unknown amount of money to Meraki just to keep their system running.
Do check out the comments, as Sanjit Biswas (Meraki CEO) answers some of his concerns.
On the other hand, on GovTech.com Sanjit Biswas presents another use case of Meraki’s being deployed in a small town center. In early 2008, Prestonsburg lit up a free Wi-Fi hotzone over a 2-mile corridor running through its downtown core, using 48 outdoor units and 12 indoor units, for a total price of $8500 (including three DSL connections with two years worth of service for $2700). Not too shabby for a local municipality, I guess.
“For Prestonsburg and many other customers, Meraki includes three years of its data center services in the price of the hardware”, Biswas said, “Larger customers can opt for a plan that discounts the hardware, but adds a monthly fee for service”.
So apparently “three years, that’s how long most of our larger customers plan to wait before upgrading to newer radio devices” according to Biswas, but that’s not how I (and Sasha Meinrath) read it.