Three years ago, Google and Earthlink won a bid to install a free city-wide Wi-Fi system in San Francisco from a special city task force. Then politics set in...The city is still mulling over all these questions, and Earthlink is now reconsidering its commitment to urban Wi-Fi systems altogether....Enter Meraki Networks...
Meraki's mesh network is uniquely suited to outfitting grassroots organizations with the means to build their own network. It's not only cheap: it was designed to run without any central control. In addition to automatically routing traffic through the different units, it enables everyone who provides an Internet access point--say, through their own DSL connection--to access their own private "dashboard," software running on Meraki's website. That allows Internet-access-point providers to set security levels, control the number of users who get access, allocate a certain amount of bandwidth to each user, and even tap into a Meraki-run billing system if they want to charge people for Internet access.
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