Want a dirt cheap Internet connection for everyone in your apartment building? Meraki Networks offers a way.
The Mountain View start-up provides cheap Wireless Internet connections to people by selling $49-a-piece “mesh” routers, or routers that connect with each other to extend the range of a single Internet connection. Meraki has just raised $5 million in a first round of venture capital, led by Sequoia capital. That follows under $1 million obtained from Google and other individual investors.
You plug the router into a power outlet and into an Internet connection, and that router extends the connection’s coverage by hooking up with other Meraki routers — and it extends that coverage further than competing technologies do, the company says.
Here’s how it worked in a Portland, Oregon test: A hundred routers were installed to cover 400 apartment units, housing about 1,000 people. A philanthropist paid $4,999 to supply the routers. The upside is, the project required only five DSL connections, and each person enjoyed the same broadband quality as they would normally from a single connection, chief executive Sanjit Biswas tells VentureBeat. The end result: Instead of each person paying $20 a month for a reliable Internet connection, they’re only paying about $1 a month, he says.
VentureBeat wrote about this company earlier.
Meraki also offers a control system, letting administrators decide which users to permit or deny on a network — and to allow things like rationing, limiting a single user to say, 1MB if he is found to be regularly hogging the system’s bandwidth. The network owner can charge for access as he or she sees fit.
Sanjit tells VentureBeat that Meraki will go after low-income areas, both in the U.S and in the developing world. The company sees an attractive market in both U.S. rural and urban areas that are underserved by Internet connections, he said.
People can buy the routers to cover their homes, apartment complexes and entire communities.
So far, the system has been in testing mode, but has been used in 25 countries. Sanjit says the company’s mission is to “connect the next billion people.” The router will go on general sale in the “coming weeks.”
12 Comments
-
will said:
I’m sure the ISP are beating down their door to endorse this (note the sarcasm!)
seriously though, I can see this working only when the “complex” or co-op negotiate directly with an ISP for a bulk deal . . .
otherwise, its not unlike fon or what ever that the other one is. . .
-
gzino said:
Certainly the P2P/mesh network type concept is exciting, but stating that 400 units could get the equivalent of one DSL connect from five DSL connects is a bit of a stretch, and isn’t really the value proposition of this type of technology. Let’s hope their algorithms, security, engineering, etc. are ahead of their marketing and PR…
-
DW said:
Yeah, it shouldn’t be a value proposition of this technology. a Wifi connection with 56Kbps is bound to be frustrating. :)
However, this is certainly an alternative if you can bring fibre to (some) curb in the area. You can connect an entire residential area with one fibre termination.
However, I found that the “cheap mesh” technology usually have a limitation on the number of nodes per uplink. (about 50-ish). How is this technology different?
-
John Doe said:
Wow, this is great technology, this will save the urban areas in apartment style living a ton of money.
I agree with the earlier comments that this will probably be used mainly by some form of apartments but I wonder how good is the security of this device.
-
anon doe said:
Let’s see their beta example:
1000 people with only 5 DSL lines ($20 each)
So service provider instead of making $20,000 will make $100? What a concept!
-
Jeremy Toeman said:
Well, FON is failing in all but 4 countries, and they are targetting a tech-savvy market who would actually be interested in such a service.
So these guys choose instead to go after low income households? Because of all that pent-up demand that lower income families have to get their powerful Wifi laptops online?
That’s a long uphill battle as far as I can see it…
-
Anonymous said:
Gzino, isn’t this exactly what cable providers do already? If you Google for oversubscription rate, you’ll see numbers like 20:1 or 40:1 (example).
400:5 is 80:1, which seems pretty steep. On the otherhand, maybe they get a bunch of 3mbit lines and cap users at 1mbit?
Anyway, I guess my point is it doesn’t have to end up being dial-up rates. Or maybe I just bought into their plan!
-
Brian McConnell said:
I think they are being smart by hyping their focos on low income and developing markets, even if that’s not where they find real success. I am planning to buy a few of these for my office. It looks like a cheap way to provide blanket wifi coverage. The price is certainly right.
-
WiFi from Wayback said:
I am sure you can make this work and get some number of packets per second. To say you will get anything near a full DSL connection is overhype, unless it was at 10am when everyone was out to work or at Starbucks. Even then you also will have significant latency, making Skype or any real time streaming media app dead in the water. Which may be ok for $1/mo.
At night when everyone logs on, forget about the bandwidth… the collisions on the wire(less) will kill the bandwidth.
IT’s one thing for telecom engineers to plan for cell tower deployments, it’s another thing to put these routers into 400 apartments and expect any reasonable spectrum sharing during heavy usage. It will fall apart.
I would not have invested ten dollars in this deal.
-
Eli Tabs said:
[quote]At night when everyone logs on, forget about the bandwidth… the collisions on the wire(less) will kill the bandwidth.[/quote]
Obviously you have not factored in the advances in Edge Server technology…
-
Anonymous said:
Google may have invested in the company, but I wonder why they’re not recommending Meraki’s gear for the muni wi-fi network they manage in Mountain View. Instead the technical nod goes to two other statups–Ruckus Wireless and PepLink…makes you wonder! source: http://wifi.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=44594
-
jjim smith said:
The commenters who are saying this is not a profitable business model are missing the point. The point is to connect people who are not able to afford the $30-$50 ripoff high speed price. By connecting the millions of people who are not now connected, they are gaining access to a huge market who will likely create capital in their use of the internet. Also, some people think there is “value” in including as many users as possible in the future economy and cultural exchange that is the internets.
