New directions for the internet lie in extending affordable broadband service to everyone’s doorstep. This is the famous last mile problem. Wi Fi looks promising but because Wi-Fi signals do not bend, and you can’t get much of a useful bounce from them there are obvious obstacles. Also Wi-Fi uses unlicensed bands of the radio spectrum and by law it must rely on low-power transmitters.This reduces its ability to penetrate walls.
One of the heavily backed solutions is WiMax.It comes in two aspects: mobile, which has not yet been certified, and fixed, which is theoretically well suited for residential deployment. Unfortunately, it’s not low price. Peter Bell, a research analyst at TeleGeography Research in Washington, said fixed WiMax would not be able to compete against cable and DSL service: “It makes more economic sense in semirural areas that have no broadband coverage.”
Coming on the scene is a new inexpensive alternative from Meraki Networks. This is a Wi-Fi network that is not top-down but rather ground-level, peer-to-peer. It relies on $50 boxes that serve, depending upon population density, more than one household and can be installed easily by anyone.
Meraki , a 15-employee start-up in Mountain View, Calif., has been field-testing Wi-Fi boxes that offer a very inexpensive solution to the “last 10 yards” problem. Rather than starting from outside the house and trying to send signals in, Meraki starts from the inside and sends signals out, to the neighbors.
Some of those neighbors will also have Meraki boxes that serve as repeaters, relaying the signal still farther to more neighbors. Meraki's boxes have software that maintains a “mesh network.” This network dynamically reroutes signals as boxes are added or removed. It also takes into account environmental conditions that affect network performance.
Last January two of Meraki’s co-founders — Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket — were still Ph.D. students at M.I.T., doing research on wireless mesh networks in the course of building Roofnet. Roofnet was an experimental network offering free service to one-third of residents of Cambridge, Mass. Later in the year Biswas gave a presentation about his experience to Google which was testing its first municipal Wi-Fi network in its hometown, Mountain View, Calif., using transmitters attached to street lamps.
After Mr. Biswas’s talk, a Google engineer told him that people using Google’s network said they could get online at home only by holding their laptops against a window. Mr. Biswas said he was not surprised. Using municipal Wi-Fi for residential coverage, he said, was “the equivalent of expecting street lamps to light everyone’s homes.”
Biswas and Bicket saw that their mesh-network gear designed for residential use could speed up the widening of Internet access everywhere. Along with a third co-founder, Hans Robertson, they moved to Silicon Valley and set up Meraki. Google and then Sequoia Capital, one of Google’s original venture capital backers, promptly invested in Meraki. Meraki’s products are still being tested, but word-of-mouth has attracted 15,000 users in 25 countries.
Meraki’s products are not yet for sale, and its networks have not been tested with extensive deployment across a large city. However, the advantages of its grass-roots approach, with miniscule expenditure for both equipment and operations, make it a a player to watch.
Meraki says it does not want to become an Internet service provider itself. Its goal is to equip any interested nontechnical person to become a “micro” service provider for his or her local community. .
This low-cost network model seems to be the way broadband service might reach many more home.
Milton Drepaul
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