Meraki has announced its plans to blanket the entire city of San
Francisco with volunteer free Wi-Fi coverage through solar-powered distributors on rooftops, attics, balconies (with free repeaters) by the end of 2008.The company also announced today
Series B funding of $20
million from Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, Northgate Capital and other
existing investors.
Meraki’s “Free the Net” program, which was launched last year in
San Francisco in select neighborhoods and exploded to serve over 40,000
users, will serve as the springboard for the city-wide program.
Meraki’s unique technology creates a wireless network by combining
signals from hundreds or thousands of low-power radio repeaters
installed on rooftops, balconies and windows, extending WiFi access to
city residents in their homes and businesses. Through communication
with Meraki central servers and intelligence worked into every
repeater, each point in the network is automatically optimized for
speed and performance without any maintenance required of users. In the
first two square miles of the project in San Francisco, the network
identified and worked around more than 20,000 sources of interference
and allowed Meraki to deliver almost 1Mbps of access to every user.
The backbone of the San Francisco network will be built using
hundreds of small solar-powered distribution points, installed on
residential and commercial rooftops — enabling quick installation and
reliable operation. As the network extends into new neighborhoods,
Meraki will offer San Francisco residents free repeaters that will
bring a high-speed, broadband signal into their homes while
strengthening the network and providing coverage to neighbors. A
repeater is not required to receive wireless access, residents may
simply hop on the free network provided by repeaters throughout the
neighborhood.
“This groundbreaking network in San Francisco will show the world
that with Meraki’s unique approach to building networks, we can quickly
bring broadband Internet access to every city in the world,” said
Sanjit Biswas, CEO and co-founder of Meraki. “By expanding our San
Francisco network we are creating the largest real-world test network
of its kind, where we plan to develop new wireless networking
technologies and also test the economics of free, ad-supported Internet
access.”
Meraki will fund the entire cost for establishing the free network
across the city, as part of an effort to showcase for other communities
around the world how the company’s technology can allow the creation of
city-wide access networks at a fraction of current costs. No public
funds will be used to build this new Meraki wireless network in San
Francisco.
The company expects to have every neighborhood up and running by
mid-year, and will be providing free wireless repeaters to residents on
an ongoing basis as the network enters new neighborhoods of the city.
To learn more about the “Free the Net” project, visit http://www.meraki.com
About Meraki
Meraki began in 2006, from a Ph.D. research project at MIT, with
the intent of helping bring affordable access to people around the
world. Starting with a single network which covered Cambridge,
Massachusetts, the technology quickly spread into 100 countries around
the world in less than a year. Today, Meraki networks are being built
in thousands of locations around the world, connecting people
everywhere from San Francisco to villages in India. Meraki is funded in
part by Sequoia Capital and Google. For more information, go to http://www.meraki.com.