Meraki proposes free Wi-Fi network for S.F.

Mountain View’s Meraki pro­poses free Wi-​​Fi net­work for S.F.:

San Francisco’s plan to pro­vide city­wide wire­less Internet access, which foundered last sum­mer when EarthLink pulled out, is being revived by a Mountain View com­pany that wants to turn the city into a test site for its vision of a low-​​cost, community-​​powered system.

For what would be the country’s largest so-​​called mesh net­work, a sys­tem that uses a con­stel­la­tion of “repeater anten­nas” to spread sig­nals, Meraki says it will donate enough equip­ment and Internet access to pro­vide free wire­less ser­vice to all res­i­dents. The net­work would use as many as 15,000 wire­less anten­nas to relay sig­nals from home to home in a type of dig­i­tal daisy-​​chain.

I’m already a Meraki node, although I’m shar­ing out my own ser­vice, and not using a Meraki-​​supplied Internet con­nec­tion. The equipment’s quite good, though, and per­haps I can even­tu­ally replace my Internet con­nec­tion with one paid for by Meraki!