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SF WiFi coming, no thanks to City, Google, or Earthlink
By Larry Hendrick | August 15, 2007
Meraki is stepping in and making free WiFi possible in San Francisco. Bypassing the City, Google, and Earthlink, Meraki sells specially equipped routers to businesses and individuals that allows them to set up public hot-spots, either for free or fee.
With their established product, Meraki is moving the wireless Internet discussion to a different level, cutting out the middleman. Going directly to Internet champions, Meraki cashes in on selling routers, and providing bandwidth in their deployments. It’s not a unique business model, with several other companies offering similar services, but this SF project will give another round of publicity to an approach other than cities spending taxpayers money.
Community Wi-Fi comes to San Francisco | CNET News.com
“This is really just a showcase to prove that grassroots groups can provide free Wi-Fi,” said Sanjit Biswas, CEO and co-founder of Meraki. “And it’s an approach that gets a network up in a weekend rather than waiting months.”Meraki will rely on volunteers to run the network. Some of the available bandwidth will be provided by Meraki through agreements it has with broadband providers in San Francisco. But it will also rely on volunteers to share their own broadband access in some parts of the city. In this way, the concept is similar to a Wi-Fi service offered by the Spanish company Fon.
The main problem with this particular type of deployment involves the Terms and Conditions of existing, larger ISPs. By purchasing their product, you agree to their T&Cs, and most prevent sharing of any type, whether fee or free.
Topics: WiFi |