Wi-Fi startup to pick up where Google left off in SF
Wireless networking startup Meraki plans to deliver free wireless Internet
access, supported by advertising, across San Francisco by the end of the year,
it announced Friday.
An earlier attempt by Google and EarthLink to offer free city-wide Wi-Fi access
in San Francisco foundered in August when EarthLink pulled out. They had planned
a two-tier service, with faster, paid access provided by EarthLink and a more
limited, advertising-funded service to be offered by Google. The search engine
giant is also an investor in Meraki.
Meraki will base the service on an existing project covering parts of the city,
Free the Net,
which has signed up 40,000 users over an area of 5 square kilometers since it
began last March.
To avoid the need for extensive cabling, Meraki will build the backbone of
the network using a mesh network of solar-powered wireless repeaters installed
on rooftops. The nodes will use some of their wireless capacity to offer Internet
access to those nearby, and the rest to haul traffic back, via adjacent nodes,
to the network's core.
The company is looking for city residents willing to put a repeater on their
roof. Those hosting a repeater will get free access to the service -- but so
will their neighbors -- although for them, the signal may not be as strong.
Although devices are shared, Meraki aims to deliver data rates of around 1M
bps (bits per second) to each user.
Meraki will pay the cost of rolling out the service, and no public funds are
involved, it said. Investors have offered the company an additional US$20 million
in venture capital to fund the move, it announced Friday.
Ozone in Paris offers
a similar wireless Internet service based on a network of wireless repeaters.
Its service is only free for those who host repeaters, though: others must pay
€18 (US$26) a month.
IDG News Service
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