Archive for the Meraki category
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.
Another great day at Wireless World. More positive feedback, support and best wishes - which was really encouraging. Mark Pesce gave a presentation titled “Everywhere” at the main speaking slot at the Wireless and Mobility Summit.
Lots of people were interested in being involved in the project with some even committing to participate in the next hardware bulk buy. We also gained some valuable contacts with vendors, organisations and government bodies which we will be looking for opportunities to work with in the future.
Day 1 at the Wireless World expo was quite successful. Lots of positive feedback (nearly non negative), and great industry contacts. Read Nat’s write-up:
“Really good day, got lots of people interested in the project and got a chance to hone our project spiel and a better idea of which points to emphasise or explain in more detail or in different ways.“
Big thanks to Nat for driving up to Sydney from Canberra in the morning (4 hours!), and back again in the evening! And big thanks also to Alison to show up and help out (on her free day, and with beautiful weather outside). Sometimes the two of us just wasn’t enough to handle all people at the booth.
Starbucks (US) has set up a social networking site where customers can sign up and share their Starbucks experience, fire off new idea’s and have people vote on them. Current number one is “All stores free wifi”. As some customers comment:
“I purposely go to a cafe in my home town that offers free wi-fi. I drive by 3 Starbucks on the way there and pay 50 cents more for the mocha for the free wi-fi.”
As an added bonus, the coffee may probably be better too… Read more over at Computer World.
If I think of all the small, independent coffee shops around town, you could form a really big mesh of free wifi in the CBD.
Tuesday, Mar 18th, 2008
Categories: Meraki
It’s been six months since the first Meraki group buy through the Facebook group.
I thought I quickly ping the community to see where we’re at.
Everyone, please feel free to respond, to one or all questions, even if you’ve only been sharing for a week. It may inspire other people to join.
A) How much bandwidth have you shared?
B) How many users are you sharing with (unique/total)?
C) Nr of Merakis open for public?
D) Standard or pro edition?
E) Are your sharing with other devices (Fon, Tomizone, Open-Mesh…)?
F) Where about (general location, suburb)?
G) Did you register on any mapping site (icanhazmeraki.net, nodedb.com,…)?
H) any horror stories?
Thanks!
Cross post from Facebook…
Just received my Meraki Mini Pro, and a Meraki High-Gain Omni-Directional Antenna for the outdoors one. They also included some stickers and a brochure (because I asked for something promo material).
Quick write-up. Playing around with the Pro dashboard. Main different feature is the user registration (and the possibility of billing, but I won’t be using that). It is disappointing that you can’t limit bandwidth/usage on a per user basis, I thought the usage configuration would be more elaborate. You can also disable the spashpage and the messaging toolbar, but I want to use both of them anyway. So, not sure if it’s worth the extra 100$, tripling the price of the Mini, or double the price of the Outdoors.
Now both the Outdoors and the Mini Pro are gateways. When I unplug the Mini Pro from my router, it automatically connects to the Outdoors, which is pretty cool (the meshing feature). But because that is a Standard version, the Mini becomes a Standard too (as expected).
I can now also see the other neigbor network through the dashboard, so when two Meraki networks are within each others reach, they can see each other, and connect to each other when one’s connection drops (as tested by unplugging). When connected to one, I can get the signal strength of the other through my.meraki.com, in dB. The Outdoors (euh, outdoors) with high-gain antenna gives me 58dB, the Mini indoors gives me 50dB.
Here is an interesting rundown on the history of Meraki and perceived negative changes that have been made to the original offering. Changes like forced advertising on the original price point while tripling the price to use the ‘Pro’ service allowing you to charge for access, most recently the right to flash other firmware onto Meraki hardware has been removed.
These changes have lead to splinter groups that are working hard (and successfully) to duplicate Meraki’s offering in an entirely open source solution. See http://www.open-mesh.com/ for one such group.
Meraki makes another business blunder
After just a few months, Meraki responded by updating their End User License Agreement [...] (which) allows the Meraki to
prevent any changes to the Meraki hardware or firmware (software) on
any new hardware purchases.[...] My ultimate goal is a completely open source solution for creating a Wireless Open Mesh Network by April 1st. Let’s work together to make that goal achievable everywhere!
One webdesigners journey with his Merakis:
“Now I am not a radio-wireless geek so I am only guessing, but I would expect that in order for this to work, every 10th house in a street would need to share their paid internet connection, and every 5th house would need a repeater. Not a big ask, but it remains a challenge. I think it can be done, we just need to spread the word.”
“It’s time for a cheaper, free internet. And to adapt a phrase from the Treasurer of the last Federal Government: Get a Meraki for yourself, one for your husband and one for the country.”
Read more about the Pro edition dashboard at NetLife.
