Sonic.Net, Meraki Team Up For SF ComMuniFi
Written by Om Malik
Friday, August 31, 2007 at 9:49 PM PT
<http://gigaom.com/2007/08/31/sonicnet-meraki-team-up-for-sf-wifi/>
Despite the best efforts of Earthlink (ENLK), Google (GOOG) and Mayor Gavin Newsom, San Francisco MuniFi project is still stuck in neutral and going nowhere fast. For San Francisco residents, a new option has emerged: a tag team of Sonic.net, a Santa Rosa, CA-based independent ISP and Meraki Networks, a wireless hardware company based in Mountain View, Calif., have come up with an ad-supported MuniFi model. (Its actually more like community wifi, and you can call it ComMuniFi.)
Sonic.net today notified its customers via email that they can get a Meraki wireless mesh router at a subsidized cost, which will allow them to connect it to their DSL line. The wireless router will share up to 500 kilobits per second of the bandwidth available on the DSL line.
Network users will see a Google ad bar at the top of the browser. In the future the ad revenues generated by this ad bar will be split between those who choose to opt and place a wireless router on their connection, and will be credited against their broadband bill.
It could be a rather small credit, so don’t get your hopes too high at this stage; this is still experimental and we are still working out many of the details.
Google had to have known all along that their San Francisco grand plan was going to run into political trouble. The big question is why didn’t they roll out a similar service with Earthlink, a much larger ISP with many more broadband customers.
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