Archive for the Meraki category
Meraki has released a new, powerful 802.11n router, the MR58, targetted at businesses (with a price tag to match). It’s an outdoors version, has three 802.11n radios, five antennas. Meraki:
“The MR58 can also be used to create long distance mesh links as far as 20 km with optional antennas.”
The folks over at Open-Mesh also have a new router, the Professional Mini Router OM1P. New features include “a hardware watchdog chip that will restart the router should it lock up due to environmental or power spikes or short outages” and Power over Ethernet. Still only US$59 (the original still available at US$50). Soon they’ll also start offering Ubiquiti and WiliGear routers, pre-flashed with the Open-Mesh software.
Ubiquiti Networks are holding a contest, the UI/Firmware Challenge with US$200.000 prize money (first prize US$160.000!), ending August 17.They have some lofty goals:
“In an effort to enrich and contribute to the open-source community, Ubiquiti Networks is offering $200,000 in cash prizes for developers who provide the most impressive User Interface/Firmware for Ubiquiti’s newly released open-source embedded wireless platform, the RouterStation.”
“The goal of the contest is to design a feature rich routing firmware with a clean, intuitive web interface for configuration and maintenance of Ubiquiti Networks RouterStation hardware platform.”
As far as I can tell, it’s not about Linux hacking, but rather the UI design only. You might need to buy their RouterStation though…
Short video interview with Meraki’s CEO Sanjit Biswas over at Fortune.
Meraki posted some interesting metric tidbits on its product blog last week:
In the course of building Free the Net in San Francisco, we came across some compelling metrics. Since its birth about a year ago, nearly 150,000 wireless devices have used the network. The percentage of those devices made up by iPhones has grown from 6% to 20% in just the past five months.
San Francisco, or California for that matter, isn’t indicative for iPhone usage around the world (with Apple and Silicon Valley around the corner). But it is an obvious trend that more and more devices have integrated Wifi, mobile broadband is still too slow and too expensive, and people want to connect, preferably free. Free, ubiquitous wireless internet, municipal or community driven, offers opportunity for social interaction, information gathering and innovative services we don’t know of yet. The iPhone hype, and any other Bold move by Blackberry, may well be the driving force for more free wireless Internet (one can hope and dream), even in Sydney.
Meraki will be developing a separate iPhone splash screen which Meraki users will be able to set up and customize soon.
Click Chick (Alison Stewart) writes about a new free Wifi project in Hawaii:
As of last week, CB Richard Ellis became the first commercial real estate company to provide free Wi-Fi in public areas of its managed buildings.
Last year Kokua Wireless provided more than 100 Meraki wireless receiver/transmitters to the city at no charge to launch the Chinatown coverage we have today.
Messaging, wireless metering and monitoring are only some of the managed services a real estate company can offer their customers with an Internet connection. Free wireless Internet is a great bonus.
Any Aussie telco’s willing to distribute 100 access points for free?
Wednesday, Aug 13th, 2008
Categories: Meraki
Meraki is introducing more changes:
- Meraki Indoor
- End of life of the Standard Edition line of products
- Prices now start at $149
The Meraki Indoor improves upon the Meraki Mini by adding built-in signal strength LEDs, a hardware watchdog for withstanding power fluctuations and a sleeker enclosure with a built-in antenna…
We are also announcing the end of life of our Standard Edition (ad-supported) products, which will no longer be available to new customers after January 31, 2009…
As an existing Standard Edition customer, your networks will continue to operate normally and Meraki will continue providing hosted services for the lifetime of the product. As part of our streamlined product offering, your networks will have certain features enabled in Dashboard which were previously only available in Pro Edition, including custom images on splash pages and unlimited device whitelisting.
Laurel Papworth talked about “Social Network Telecommunications – the Consumer as ISP” at the Broadband Australia 2008 summit.
Social networks will want always on, ambient, mobile connectivity so that they can take advantage of these services.
She mentioned Fon, Meraki, Open-Mesh and Free Australia Wireless.
Check out her presentation on Slideshare.
We need more people, more often talking about these issues, so the industry (telco’s, isp’s,…) and government can’t no longer ignore this trend.
Monday, Jul 21st, 2008
Categories: 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.
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom gets the point, over at San Francisco’s SFGate:
San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said Wednesday that citywide wireless Internet access is slowly becoming a reality despite political infighting – and that 144,000 residents will be surfing the Web for free by the end of the year at no cost to the city.
He’s talking about the Meraki network of course:
Newsom is calling the idea Wi-Fi 2.0 – a nod to his high-profile but unsuccessful first attempt to bridge the “digital divide” between San Franciscans who take Internet access for granted and low-income people who can’t easily log on to e-mail, find job listings or surf news sites.
The mayor’s office is working to ensure that single-room-occupancy hotels and public housing projects are some of the first to receive the devices because residents there typically don’t have Internet access. Five public housing projects now have the technology, and 13 more are expected to have it by the end of the year, Newsom said.
As large-scale, for-profit projects falter, innovative new models emerge, as John Cox writes on NetworkWorld:
Strictly speaking, the community networking projects don’t require municipal involvement at all. They are self-organized, self-funded local movements that use a variety of technologies, both open source and modified commodity products, to share existing broadband services, such as DSL connections. And they use the unlicensed radio bands for wireless access.
“We need to get back to the original rationales [of] why we should be building these networks in the first place,” Sascha Meinrath, research director, Wireless Future Program, at the New America Foundation says. “Personally, I’m business model agnostic. I’m far more focused on how these models meet the social and economic justice
needs of the communities they serve.”
The article further covers 10 interesting muni wifi projects, including San Fran’s Meraki network, PTP, a wireless crime-fighting video network, and others.
Friday, Apr 11th, 2008
Categories: Meraki
Again we’re not promoting Meraki explicitly, but they do make a great point. A local airport supporting 10000+ users in the first couple of months, with 5 Merakis, installed by a third party, for 1100 USD.
Read a comprehensive review of the Meraki hardware over at Practically Networked.
BarCamp Sydney v3 has passed again. We set up a wireless network for attendees to use. With the Internet connection handled by UNSW, so plenty of bandwidth, we set up two gateway nodes and one repeater (one Outdoor and two Mini’s). Of course, we could easily manage the splashpage with a BarCamp welcome, as well as have BarCamp and Free Australia Wireless text banners.
The Meraki’s handled traffic pretty good, with people playing WoW, watching youTube, surfing, demoing,… with the Meraki’s handling about 50 users and transferring 1.8 Gb over each day.
You can clearly see when lunch was on…
We talked to lots of people, mostly in the hallway, and in our presentation on Saturday we focused on the Meraki Dashboard and its settings. We also had a group discussion on developing meshing software for mobile devices or laptops. And then there was even a presentation on how, with the help of a couple of Merakis, a student circumvented his school’s net censorship… Some people signed up for a group buy (we’ll get back to you soon!).
Sunday afternoon, we had a Meraki Mini to give away to the attendees.
