Posted 01.04.2008 at 2:20 pm
9 Comments
Earthlink failed. Google's effort didn't work out. But now a startup called Meraki Networks—a company we've been following for some time—hopes to construct a city-wide Wi-Fi network in San Francisco within the next year. To make it work, the company will have to persuade thousands of San Francisco residents to set up radio repeaters in their homes and on rooftops (including versions like the coming-soon solar-powered version pictured here).
While this sounds like a monumental task, it may prove easier than Earthlink's plan, which called for setting up transmitters on public property and, as a result, became bogged down in bureaucracy. In all, Meraki will need to set up more than 10,000 repeaters, according to the company's CEO. Right now, Meraki has installed enough of the devices to give 40,000 people in the city free access. But this isn't just about San Francisco. Meraki will offer the service free there, but it has much bigger plans. The company hopes that the San Francisco project will prove the viability of its technology, which it then hopes to sell to other countries to generate revenue.
In December, PopSci gave Meraki a Grand Award in our annual Best of What's New issue; we're happy to see them as ambitious as ever.—Gregory Mone
9 Comments
To comment, please Login.
|
|
|
|
|
|
June 2013: American Energy Independence
Five amazing, clean technologies that will set us free, in this month's energy-focused issue. Also: how to build a better bomb detector, the robotic toys that are raising your children, a human catapult, the world's smallest arcade, and much more.
Popular on Popsci
Most Commented
Science
- Scientists Create First Cloned Human Embryo
- Dear Schools: Stop Treating Science-Curious Kids Like Criminals
- State Drops Charges Against High School Student Arrested For Science Experiment
- Mexican Cartels Control Pot Farms As Far North As Washington State
- Buzz Aldrin Wants To Send People On A One-Way Trip To Mars
- Giving White People The Illusion Of Darker Skin Makes Them Less Racist
- Space Tourism's Black Carbon Problem
- What Modern Humans Can Learn From The Neanderthals' Extinction
- Untouched For The Last Billion Years, Water In Canadian Mine Holds Ingredients For Life
- How Do You Make A Painkiller Addiction-Proof?
Most Emailed
Science
- The Week In Numbers: Fire In Space, The First Cloned Human Embryo, And More
- 8 Of The Year's Most Oddly Gorgeous Science Images
- 8 Of The Year's Most Oddly Gorgeous Science Images
- A Zombie Worm And Other Amazing Images From This Week
- A Zombie Worm And Other Amazing Images From This Week
- Cambrian Fossil With Scissor-Like Claws Is Named For Johnny Depp
- First American Mission To Sample An Asteroid Gets Green Light
- High School Students Devise More Accurate Climate Modeling Method
- Wanna Know How You're Going To Survive The Apocalypse?
- This Bacterium Can Do Division, Compute Logarithms And Take Square Roots
Most Viewed
Science
- The Week In Numbers: Fire In Space, The First Cloned Human Embryo, And More
- 8 Of The Year's Most Oddly Gorgeous Science Images
- 8 Of The Year's Most Oddly Gorgeous Science Images
- A Zombie Worm And Other Amazing Images From This Week
- A Zombie Worm And Other Amazing Images From This Week
- Cambrian Fossil With Scissor-Like Claws Is Named For Johnny Depp
- First American Mission To Sample An Asteroid Gets Green Light
- High School Students Devise More Accurate Climate Modeling Method
- Wanna Know How You're Going To Survive The Apocalypse?
- This Bacterium Can Do Division, Compute Logarithms And Take Square Roots
Online Content Director: Suzanne LaBarre | Email
Senior Editor: Paul Adams | Email
Associate Editor: Dan Nosowitz | Email
Assistant Editor: Colin Lecher | Email
Assistant Editor: Rose Pastore | Email
Contributing Writers:
Rebecca Boyle | Email
Kelsey D. Atherton | Email
Francie Diep | Email
Shaunacy Ferro | Email
Today on PopSci.com
Copyright © 2012 Popular Science
A Bonnier Corporation Company. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited.
The thought of providing city wide wi-fi would be awesome. Especially if the service were free of charge to for the users. This would be a great way of promoting its' us an a lure for the techno savy. Great articles all keep em coming.
Estonia got a country-wide wireless connection a few months ago (http://www.kou.ee/index.php?id=100&L=1). It is not free of charge and its not the ordinary wi-fi connection, but it's cheap enough for most people (~10$ month + device cost ~250$) and it covers Estonia entirely.
Earthlink WIFI in Anaheim,Ca. is $21.95/mo.
I'm a designer-for-hire and am constantly travelling. I hate paying $40/mo for T-Mobile's WiFi I can only access at Starbucks and FedEx-Kinkos when I'm out of the house! If I can help evangelize the service to local shops in hopes that one day soon I can cancel my $$$ monthly payment for internet access, give me some materials to take to my neighborhood and I'll help spread the word!
Beyond the banner tabloid heading of free access (in one paticular geographic market), this network allows you to resell your home ADSL connection to others via proprietary Wi-Fi hardware and account management interfaces so that rather than a free service its best viewed as either a micro business franchise where the management is through a Meraki web portal or alternatively as a disaggregated, low cost, semi ad-hoc, flexible and potentially robust connection. But before that I suppose that its just horses for courses.
I HOPE THIS SERVICE COMES TO CINCINNATI OHIO
Sounds nice in theory, but in practice most internet providers consider a meraki node a violation of their terms of service without an agreement with them specifically for that. So thousands of these civic-minded volunteers need to buy business Internet bundles and meet with their providers all to set up free WiFi nodes.
Result: This is likely DOA.
free internet...free fun... free e-mail... Awesome... cross ur fingers!
@TOM: Read closely, what Meraki is trying to do is setup "radio repeaters" not access points that use the personal network of whoever set them up. Follow the article for more technical details, but Meraki is going to donate the hardware and bandwidth (not sure where they're getting it from but I would assume an Internet backbone) free of charge in return for using SF as a showroom to sell their systems to other cities (who will probably get their bandwidth from other sources).
Their signal repeaters are only about $50 and one DSL line can feed about 10-50 repeaters. They are saying that the system will have around 1 megabit per second of throughput. FON, another company that tried to setup city-wide WiFi, hasn't really taken off because they asked users to share their personal networks.
I would love for a city-wide WiFi network like this in Dallas..especially with my little Internet Tablet that can only seem to find free WiFi at home, work and a bookstore.
-the purring dork