Google invests less than $1M in Meraki for indoor WiFi

December 1, 2006 | Matt Marshall | Comments |

merakimini.bmpCompared to other companies its size, Google makes few venture investments, preferring to buy companies outright.

However, it has invested less than $1 million into Mountain View wireless router start-up Meraki Networks, according to GigaOm.

The router is being touted as a way to extend municipal WiFi coverage indoors, and appears to be linked to Google’s efforts to create a wireless network in cities like Mountain View and San Francisco.

SanjitBiswas.bmpThe router is based on wireless mesh technology developed by co-founder Sanjit Biswas (pictured left, see bio and background) and others at MIT’s Roofnet project3.

Biswas says the funding is a “bridge round,” which refers to funding that helps tide a company over until it can get more cash in a future round of investment. He tells Gigaom that it includes “a few Silicon Valley angels.”

Meanwhile, Google’s talks with San Francisco to implement a city-wide WiFi network drag on, though they appear to be making progress.

We’ve mentioned Meraki before here

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  • RK
    Mesh is Interesting technology, but I am not convinced how one can money as Mini ISP (there customers), they need a killer app to enable this product. WiFi router are already cheaply $40 and below available from Belkin, Linksys etc also they are based on open source SW, Seattle wireless has hooks to open existing AP's from linksys etc..

    Also there are already some roadkill in this market such as FON, DeviceScape ( Systems integration company for Wifi Router), Chip vendors are already providing turnkey solution to there customers with open source!

    Only innovation Meraki has is there Protocol for Mesh for backhaul communication among's routers.

    Also why would one let some XYZ company control there Wifi Router ? at a cost.

    Missing some Value Prop here!

    RK
  • I disagree. This may not become a mass market product, but it has a lot of potential uses in wifi+voip networks (campus environments, for example).

    I have been testing wifi+voip products, and while they've improved a lot (see what Gizmo is up to), there is still a lot of work to be done to make wireless voip work as well as it could.

    I don't think the idea of building commercial consumer networks based on this is particularly interesting, but there are a lot of situations where products like this, if they offer good sys admin and zone-to-zone roaming, will be useful to somebody, and probably for something the founders did not initially expect.
  • RK
    Hi Brian,

    I was commenting based on what Meraki is proposing on there Web site i.e they want to sell this Residential customer and Mini ISP's wanna be.

    On your comment VOIP on Wifi Router, problem here are several one is AP to Mobile Client, were one can run the power down of handset due

    This is due to MAC layer CSMA/CD protocol design, there are some band aid's such as 802.11e overlay on top of CSMA/CA, but a time slot based protocol is more efficient such as enhanced TDMA. also on Rapid Hand off between AP's there is emerging Spec at IEEE. Also there other options such as Meru Networks protocol. On the Mesh side there is Tropos, Packet Hop, Air Pilot and more for Campus, Muni applications.

    So once again I belive there are several options out there, But there is no opensource sys admin SW, out there to manage multiple AP's.

    Cheers!
    RK