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Wireless - Friday, January 4, 2008

Meraki Fills In For Failed Google/Earthlink Project By Provding Free Wireless To SF

San Francisco's population is around 800K and 40K of them are getting free Internet access from a Mountain View startup called Meraki. San Franciscans were set to enjoy free access from a partnership formed by Google, Earthlink and the city government but that failed due to civic infighting. The beauty of Meraki is that it doesn't rely on city funds rather the company asks volunteers to place repeaters on their windows and rooftops to provide the signal to the neighborhood. So far the project has a 2 mile by 2 mile footprint - the compact city is only 7 miles by 7 miles so Meraki doesn't have far to go to cover the place. Meraki hopes to finish the job by the end of the year.

So how is Meraki financing the venture? Well it just raised $20M in funding from Sequoia Capital DAG Venture, Northgate Capital and existing investor. It has raised $5M from Sequoia and Google. It also makes some money from ads served to users. Merakis core business is to sell equipment.

It may not sounds like there is much sophisticated technology here but in fact Meraki has created inexpensive routers and a back-end networking service that balances available bandwidth between the routers and users which makes for more efficient bandwidth.

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