Meraki brings free WiFi to 100,000 San Franciscans
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… Continue Reading
Meraki rolls out free WiFi throughout San Francisco
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”… Continue Reading
Social router company, FON, raises $13M amid new competition
(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… Continue Reading
Meraki wires square mile in SF with WiFi
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… Continue Reading
Meraki raises $5M to “connect the next billion people”
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… Continue Reading
Google invests less than $1M in Meraki for indoor WiFi
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… Continue Reading