Slog - Comments on Winning the War on Wireless

Comment by mattymatt

mattymatt — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:09:15 -0800

Actually, I don't think Meraki and the city have a relationship. The mayor is happy to take credit; but I've seen nothing to indicate that the city "fostered" anything with Meraki other than a photo-op. While the city and Earthlink failed to collaborate, Meraki's doing this all on their own (with help from Google). They own the equipment and the pipes; it was a free gift to SF because it was a test case, but Meraki's planning to charge in the future.

So, it's not really municipal, since the city has no control over it -- it's entirely private. And I'll happily take private WiFi over public vaporware.

Comment by Will in Seattle

Will in Seattle — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:29:27 -0800

Can't we just outsource it to Japan or South Korea or some place where they deliver 10 to 20 times the bandwidth and storage at one-tenth to one-twentieth the cost?

Oh, wait, that would involve permitting capitalistic non-monopolies to function in our society ... can't have that, King George might object, or one of his Red Royalists ...

Comment by mattw

mattw — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 17:58:37 -0800

Meraki has given away thousands of routers to people in very specific areas in San Francisco (you enter in your address, and they send one to you). The routers mesh with each other and users are expected (but not required) to plug them into their internet connections. In exchange for the free hardware, Meraki gets their name out there, revenue from the packet injecting ad bar, and control over the equipment. If you can connect, you get free access. That's great, but you can believe they're not just going to hand these out to everyone.

If people here are interested in building a mesh, without the corporate subsidies (or the strings), you can do this today by installing some free firmware (openwrt with olsr-ng) on your access point that is not only open source, but used all over the world. We (SeattleWireless.net) have nodes scattered throughout the city, but it's a part time project spread out among volunteers, not a commercial venture. While we don't have the dough to subsidize your gear, we will give you a hand with it if you're going to help create the network.

Municipal wireless might just turn out to be a loser, but Community Wireless does work. It just seems to be a little harder in the US.

CWN list on Wikipedia

Funkfeuer (austrian free network) has a great saying.

don't log into the net - be the net!

Comment by Steve Leonard

Steve Leonard — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 22:15:10 -0800

At least with respect to your comments on the Japanese wireless industry, NTT DoCoMo IS wireless in Japan. It does not get any more monolithic than their approach to technology. They are still effectively a monopoly, or at least the leader in an unbalance oligopoly.

Although their market share has slipped somewhat over the last 10 years, they basically make their own weather over there. They control so much of the market that they are able to develop and enforce their own infrastructure standards - unlike the US wireless carriers that operate in such a competitive market that they are forced to buy proprietary vendor solutions.

Yes, they have led with digital mobile voice and data services - but don't fool yourself that those services were rolled out due to 'capitalistic non-monopolistic' market forces.

Comment by Greg

Greg — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:15:17 -0800

So how does this work for security?