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Months after Earthlink gave up on providing municipal wireless service in San Francisco, a company called Meraki is quietly moving forward with its plans to blanket the entire city in free WiFi. In fact, the company just crossed a big threshold — Meraki says more than 100,000 people have used its Free the Net service.

That number is more than double the 40,000 users that Google- and Sequoia-backed Meraki was reporting at the beginning of the year. Meraki’s wireless network currently offers its most comprehensive coverage in San Francisco’s Bernal Heights and Noe Valley neighborhoods; residents of those areas plus the Mission, Alamo Square, Hayes Valley, Russian Hill and the Castro can ask Meraki for free repeaters to spread that network even further. (See the map of Meraki coverage below.) Meraki even provides free wireless to some of the city’s affordable housing developments, and plans to expand in that area, too.

Chief executive Sanjit Biswas says that Earthlink and Meraki have very different business models. Unlike Earthlink, Meraki isn’t seeking the city government’s financial support or approval, and it isn’t looking to make money from the network, either. Instead, Biswas describes Free the Net as a “testbed” and showcase for the company’s wireless technology, which Meraki then sells elsewhere. (The company runs local ads as part of its Free the Net service, but only as an experiment. Meraki isn’t making any money from those ads.)

As for providing wireless in affordable housing projects, Biswas says Meraki stumbled on that idea by accident. Without really planning to do so, Meraki covered some affordable housing units with its network, then noticed that there was substantial usage in those areas. (Biswas says he doesn’t have exact numbers, but estimates there were “dozens” of users in a building with 100 units.) That’s kind of surprising, but Biswas notes that Free the Net is a way to provide fast Internet connections to people who own computers and perhaps dial-up Internet connections, but can’t afford broadband. (Broadband growth is slowing, after all.) Impressively, Meraki isn’t spending any city dollars on this project, either.

Sadly, it’s hard to imagine that every city can get free WiFi as a loss-leader for projects elsewhere. But Biswas says Meraki is seeing healthy growth for its pay product too, particularly in emerging markets like Latin America and Africa. As an example, he says Meraki created a wireless network for a village in Chile in just five days. There’s interest in the United States, too, primarily with an “amenity” model, e.g., a business association pays Meraki so that shoppers can get free WiFi in Harvard Square.

As a Noe Valley resident, I’ve already benefited from Free the Net — I’m not covered at home, but I use the network whenever I’m writing at my neighborhood coffee shop. The company is still a ways off from its goal of covering the entire city, but I’m definitely rooting for its success.

Meraki, the Google Mafia-run company which builds WiFi repeaters that lets residents surf the Web for free, now says it aims to spread its WiFi network across the entire city of San Francisco.

The company’s offering has proven popular in testing, with more than 40,000 people using Meraki’s WiFi connections in its initial two-square mile pilot test in San Francisco. People learn about the service through word of mouth, or by seeing Meraki’s “Free the Net” network name when they scan available wireless networks for their computer use.

While popular thus far, the company has a ways to go. People are using the WiFi network mainly for free, and so the company has yet to make money. Meraki provides the WiFi repeaters for free, which makes the service possible. People can access the service without owning a repeater. Sanjit Biswas, CEO and co-founder of Meraki, said the company doesn’t plan to make money from selling the repeaters. Rather, it is trying to showcase its technology in San Francisco — so that it can provide its WiFi systems to developing countries such as Brazil or India. That’s how it plans to make money.

It has also just raised $20 million more in financing to help it. The second round of funding comes from DAG Ventures, which led the round, and existing investors Sequoia Capital and Northgate Capital.

The company has an intriguing back-end. It uses solar-powered panels on rooftops to provide power for the operation (see image at top; Meraki employee John Tso installs a panel on rooftop). In San Francisco, the company’s network overcame “thousands” of cases of interference, it said, allowing Meraki to deliver almost 1Mbps of access to each user.

It’s testing an ad-supported model, too, so that it can sell wireless operators on the idea.

The company expects to have every SF neighborhood up and running by mid-year.

(Updated, corrected investor information)

FON, the Madrid, Spain company that offers routers to people that FON members can share if they want, has raised a second round of funding.

It has received $13M from existing investors Index Ventures and Google, and from four undisclosed non-US investors (the company says names will be announced at a later date). Its total funding is now $35 million, and comes a time when a raft of competitors have entered the market, such as Whisher, a Benchmark Capital-backed company, which targets FON directly, and other players that overlap with FON, such as Meraki.

FON says it has a total of 320,000 members and more than 120,000 WiFi hot spots that those members can access. In the US, more than 60,000 hot spots have gone up over the past two months, serving 45,000 members. Joanna Rees is chief executive of FON USA (Update: The company says Joanna is an early investor in FON too).

Here’s a post by Martin Varsavsky, the CEO and founder, announcing the funding news.

Seeking to spur its growth, Google-backed start-up Meraki is wiring up a square mile in a hip part of San Francisco with free Internet access by giving away its mesh WiFi router product.

The region, which has 15,000 residents, covers Mission Dolores Park through the Castro and Duboce Park Neighborhoods and up to Alamo Square Park.

We covered the company previously here.

This could effectively double Meraki’s users. It has 15,000 users already. The question is how it plans to make money, if it has to keep acting as a catalyst by giving these away or relying on philanthropists to pay for them.

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.”

Compared 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.

The 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