Meraki’s Freeing Up The Net

San Francisco based Meraki is hard at work on giving the nearly one-million people in their fair city free, ubiquitous internet access; of course, if they get their way, they’ll have the whole world connected in a matter of years. Using wireless repeaters that are distributed free-of-charge to people with internet access, the company has quickly built a free wireless network throughout San Francisco that, as of today, reaches 114,527 users with even more joining on every hour.

Like many of today’s most ambitious tech-projects, Meraki began as an MIT research project aimed at bettering the world; in this case, their goal was to give free wireless internet to MIT Graduate students. The project, however, quickly expanded between its MIT confines and into some of the most remote corners of the world, alongside a few of its largest cities.

Unfortunately, Meraki’s equipment (understandably) isn’t free for newcomers outside of San Francisco. Instead, they’ve developed a number of hardware options for those wishing to create or expand the realm of free internet throughout the world. Aside from their indoor and outdoor varieties, Meraki is readying a solar model set to be launched (hopefully) within the next year.

Backed by Google and Sequoia Capital, Meraki is fast on-track to its goal of bringing the internet to “the next billion people.” With a lot of passion and a bit of help from its backers, Meraki is aiming to have all of San Francisco covered by the end of the year. Of course, while Meraki began as very much of a grassroots movement, some now claim that it’s losing the fire that it had on day one; with the removal of open-source options for the Meraki units’ software, network junkies have been quick to point out that the company seemingly isn’t what it used to be.

Still, their Free the Net campaign throughout San Francisco is enough to prove that they’ve got at least a little of what it takes to fuel their mission statement and truly bring the internet to the fingertips of the rest of the world.