Meraki Brings the Net the Final Ten Yards

This morning I decided to open the cafe to just Cindy and me. Despite a regular customer who popped by wanting a coffee, “Sorry, we’re closed,” we have the cozy cafe all to ourselves, and we made omelettes, read the NY Times and enjoyed lattes and good music from the ipod.

The Times did not disappoint–I found an intriguing article about a new and better way to deliver WiFi the last ten yards inside people’s homes. Author Randall Stross, a professor at San Jose State, described the earliest days of electricity. There was a time when towns believed that they could use streetlights to light up people’s homes. It was a fad in the 1880s, and is an apt metaphor for Wireless. There are just too many shadows and curves to expect a wireless signal, like light from a lamp post, to effectively bring either light or the internet into a home. The many municipal WiFi schemes have come up against this problem, in Google’s wireless hometown of Mountain View CA, people need to bring their laptops close to a window to get a good signal.

Enter two Ph.D students from MIT, Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket. They’ve developed Meraki, which uses $49 boxes placed inside houses to create a shared network among neighborhoods. So far more than 15,000 users have discovered the joys of a cheap and effective way to share a signal, and of course, Google is investing in Meraki too.

In Portland, OR, Michael Burmeister-Brown set up a network in 400 low-income apartments, using just five DSL lines and 100 Meraki boxes. It works out to about $1 a month and for an investment of just $5000 and $13 per house, voila, you’re on line.

Maybe the Meraki is the way we will make GoNOMAD CAFE an internet provider, right here in little old Deerfield!