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