Meraki Pushes For Free WiFi In San Francisco
Free WiFi is having another go in San Francisco. Basically, corporate Earthlink and bureaucratic nonsense couldn’t get it working.
This San Francisco Chronicle article describes how startup Meraki has an idea which is to just hand out the hardware for free and let people open up the networks organically.
For what would be the country’s largest so-called mesh network, a system that uses a constellation of “repeater antennas” to spread signals, Meraki says it will donate enough equipment and Internet access to provide free wireless service to all residents. The network would use as many as 15,000 wireless antennas to relay signals from home to home in a type of digital daisy-chain.
This project is a test of the power of the people / communist elements of Web 2.0 — and therefore, I hope it succeeds. Plus, I’m all into the free stuff.
Additional Reading: SV / SJ Business Journal, VentureBeat, Meraki
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This sounds like an interesting plan. Though since it’s a small outfit using SF as a test-bed of sorts who knows what will happen between now and implementation (or even after it’s launched) given the volatility of startups.
Btw…it looks like you might have a spammer in the “top commenters” module.