[SIO-SWAP] Google, Meraki, Wireless and Mesh Networking

[Val Schmidt]

I don't know if any of you saw the Sunday NY Times article entitled:  
Wireless Internet for All, Without the Towers

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/business/yourmoney/04digi.html

Form the article:

An intriguingly inexpensive alternative has appeared: a Wi-Fi network  
that is not top-down but rather ground-level, peer-to-peer. It relies  
not on $3,500 radio transmitters perched on street lamps by  
professional installers but instead on $50 boxes that serve,  
depending upon population density, more than one household and can be  
installed by anyone with the ease of plugging in a toaster.

Meraki Networks, a 15-employee start-up in Mountain View, Calif., has  
been field-testing Wi-Fi boxes that offer the prospect of providing  
an extremely inexpensive solution to the “last 10 yards” problem. It  
does so with a radical inversion: 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. The  
company equips its boxes with software that maintains a “mesh  
network,” which dynamically reroutes signals as boxes are added or  
unplugged, and as environmental conditions that affect network  
performance fluctuate moment to moment.


-Val


------------------------------------------------------
Val Schmidt
CCOM/JHC
University of New Hampshire
Chase Ocean Engineering Lab
24 Colovos Road
Durham, NH 03824
e: vschmidt [AT] ccom.unh.edu
m: 614.286.3726


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