San Franciscans Joining Grassroots Wi-Fi Initiative

A community Wi-Fi movement is taking place in the urban neighborhoods of San Francisco. Today more than 6,500 San Francisco residents and business owners concentrated in the Mission, Haight, and Alamo Square neighborhoods are tapping into a growing free Wi-Fi network with the help of a company called Meraki. Compared to a top-down municipal Wi-Fi approach, Meraki says it takes a truly unique and innovative bottoms-up approach by empowering individuals to connect and build a Wi-Fi community.

The new San Francisco Wi-Fi community was started a little more than five months ago by Meraki as an initiative called Free the Net. Due to the successful expansion of this Wi-Fi community and significant interest coming from many other San Franciscans asking to join, Meraki today announced plans to expand its support to neighborhoods across San Francisco.

"Our goal is to bring wireless Internet access to the next billion people around the world," said Sanjit Biswas, CEO and co-founder for Meraki, "And in San Francisco, we have proven that a community can take it in their own hands to build and scale the wireless Internet, and enable free access across neighborhoods."

Using Meraki's innovative technology, Wi-Fi signals stream back and forth building a web of meshwireless connections. This mesh makes it possible to use a minimal number of DSL broadband lines to blanket Internet access across a large area. Any San Francisco resident can to tap into the Free the Net network and access the Internet if they are in the given area where the signal is available. For San Franciscans who are beyond the reach of the signal, they can volunteer to expand the network by signing up and plugging in a signal booster, called the Meraki Mini. The booster will pick up the signals from other Meraki Minis nearby plugged into Meraki sponsored DSL lines. Optionally, individuals can plug the Mini into their own DSL and donate their own bandwidth to build the network. The more people who participate in the shared network, the more powerful it becomes.

The Meraki Mini (indoor version) has a list price of $49. Meraki is distributing these units free in limited quantities to volunteers who want to sign up and expand community Wi-Fi access in San Francisco. To date, there are approximately 1,500 volunteers in San Francisco who are already signed up to help build and power the network.

"It's great that the San Francisco community can come together to answer the call for building free public Wi-Fi. We anticipate that this community will grow to 15,000 participants in San Francisco by the end of the year. Our hope is that other towns and cities across the world can adopt this cooperative approach in making the Internet more accessible for everyone," said Biswas.

Meraki was started in 2006 by a small team of MIT PhD graduate students who say they have embarked upon a broader mission to change the economics of Internet access and bring the Internet to the next billion people. The company is based in Mountain View, California, and has received a $5 million round of funding from Sequoia and other investors including Google. For more information, go to www.meraki.com.

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Photo by Hobvias Sudoneighm. Creative Commons License Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0

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