Mountain View’s Meraki proposes free Wi-Fi network for S.F.

Ryan Kim, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, January 4, 2008
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/01/04/MNCDU8UKU.DTL

San Francisco’s plan to provide citywide wireless Internet access, which foundered last summer when EarthLink pulled out, is being revived by a Mountain View company that wants to turn the city into a test site for its vision of a low-cost, community-powered system.

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.

San Francisco is the only city offered free service from Meraki, which plans to use the city as a showroom of sorts to sell its products to other municipalities and communities around the world.

Whether the plan works will be up to residents, who the company hopes will volunteer to erect thousands of devices on their rooftops, balconies or in windows.

Since the venture will use private property, it does not require city approval. Instead, Meraki is betting on San Franciscans’ innovative spirit.

“There is no network like this,” said Sanjit Biswas, chief executive and co-founder of Meraki.

Meraki, through an initiative called Free the Net, has been testing its mesh system in San Francisco’s Mission, Lower Haight and Alamo Square neighborhoods since the spring. About 500 repeaters already are in use, providing service to 40,000 users.

With the backing of venture capital firms Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures and Northgate Capital, which have contributed $20 million, Meraki plans to blanket the city for less than $5 million, compared to the estimated $14 million to $17 million EarthLink had estimated it would cost to build a city network.

Meraki officials said they expect every neighborhood to get some access by the end of this year.

Meraki said it will deliver download speeds of 1 megabit per second, which is three times as fast as the speed for free access proposed in the city’s original plan. The company will not gather private user data, Biswas added.

Security will be similar to that of Internet hot spots – that is, not infallible – so users should be careful about using the system for sensitive transactions, the company said.

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