Startup company plans free WiFi in San Francisco
The free WiFi project is once again closer to the reality: Wireless networking startup Meraki plans to deliver free wireless Internet access, supported by advertising, across San Francisco by the end of the year, it announced Friday. An earlier attempt by Google and EarthLink to offer free city-wide Wi-Fi access in San Francisco foundered in August when EarthLink pulled out. They had planned a two-tier service, with faster, paid access provided by EarthLink and a more limited, advertising-funded service to be offered by Google. The search engine giant is also an investor in Meraki. Meraki will base the service on an existing project covering parts of the city, Free the Net, which has signed up 40,000 users over an area of 5 square kilometers since it began last March.
To avoid the need for extensive cabling, Meraki will build the backbone of the network using a mesh network of solar-powered wireless repeaters installed on rooftops. The nodes will use some of their wireless capacity to offer Internet access to those nearby, and the rest to haul traffic back, via adjacent nodes, to the network’s core. The company is looking for city residents willing to put a repeater on their roof. Those hosting a repeater will get free access to the service — but so will their neighbors — although for them, the signal may not be as strong. Although devices are shared, Meraki aims to deliver data rates of around 1M bps (bits per second) to each user. Meraki will pay the cost of rolling out the service, and no public funds are involved, it said. Investors have offered the company an additional US$20 million in venture capital to fund the move, it announced Friday.
Source: PC World
dat will be so good when it comes in!
i am not sure about the speed though, but everything free is good…
Well that is nothing new… We have had that for years here in Leiden in Holland… Good thing though
Now I have to upgrade my tin foil hat to a faraday cage. *sigh*
I were always told that nothing in this world is free.
So this will not happen
Expect your web experience be flooded with ads.
Why, one might ask, is WiFi and wired internet connection not a public utility like water and sewer?
I can tell you why it isn’t in the state where I live. Because the big companies like Comcast rammed laws through the state legislature making it ILLEGAL for a municipality or other public entity to build or maintain internet connection systems.
Might be good news for San Franciso …. but doesn’t FONERA already offer this service in the US??
FONERA is available in many countries US, Canada, Europe … :
https://shop.fon.com/FonShop/shop/ShopController
Forget to mention if your a BT (British Telecom) customer on OPTION 3, you can subscribe to this service for FREE in the UK and use in when your travelling abroad.
My hometown talked about this, but time passed and the option no longer made financial sense. Unless the city is willing to put out taxpayer $$, it is a bad business model to give away free internet. Ads just don’t generate enough revenue to cover the $20 million dollar outlay, plus you have to deatl with Electric and phone comapanies so you can put the repeaters on their poles.
There used to be free internet services with a fixed box for advertising…what happened to them? GONE!
@ Klark Kent
Here’s an article from a UK newspaper - The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2008/jan/03/advertising.digitalmedia
UK web ad spend ‘to exceed TV in 2009′
The UK will become the first major economy to see advertisers spend more on the internet than on TV ads, according to the latest forecast from a leading media buying agency.
Group M, the combined media planning and buying operation owned by Sir Martin Sorrell’s WPP group, predicts that UK internet ad spend will overtake TV, which has been the leading advertising medium for half a century, in 2009.
The agency is also predicting that Sweden will this year become the first country to see advertisers spend more on the internet than on TV ads.
Group M forecasts that the UK will be on the brink of passing the milestone at the end of 2008, when the internet will account for 24.8% of UK media spend, just behind the 26% share held by the TV ad sector, according to Group M.
After that, UK internet ad spend will need to grow just another 6% year on year to overtake TV in 2009.
Group M predicts that UK internet revenue is likely to climb by 30.8% this year, to £3.4bn, compared with just 1% year-on-year growth in TV ad spend to around £3.56bn.
Adam Smith, the futures director at Group M, said that the UK was a “special case” that meant it would be the first of the world’s big economies to pass the milestone of internet ad spend overtaking TV.
“The UK is a special cases,” he added. “Its TV share [of all media spend] is depressed by the BBC and there is still a large and healthy print sector and Britons are among the world’s heaviest internet users.”
However, Smith cautioned that this did not mean the demise of TV as a major advertising medium.
“The internet is not one medium, its growth rate is a blend of three distinct businesses growing at different speeds: search, display and classified,” he said.
“Most of the growth is coming from search advertising and that is being fuelled by either new money or from the direct marketing sector, not so much from TV ad budgets.”
Group M estimates that search spend accounted for 63% of all internet ad revenue in 2007 and will take a 65% share this year.
Search will grow by around 35% this year, while the smaller display and classified sectors will see growth of around 20%.
“The growth of search is not a threat to established media,” said Smith. “It is the growth of online display advertising, although small, that is a threat with money coming from areas such as newspaper ad revenue and maybe some TV spend.”
In Sweden, at the close of last year TV ads accounted for 19.8% of all media spend, compared with the internet’s 16.7% share, according to Group M.
By the close of 2008 the internet will have grown to take a 19.5% share of all media spend in Sweden, compared to the 19.2% share held by TV advertising.
“Sweden is an exception but time and again the internet turns exceptions into rules,” said Smith.
“Television’s share of advertising spend in Sweden is small because it is a relative latecomer to commercial TV.”
Group M measures “net” advertising revenues, excluding money made from agency commission charges.
Source: Guardian
“I can tell you why it isn’t in the state where I live. Because the big companies like Comcast rammed laws through the state legislature making it ILLEGAL for a municipality or other public entity to build or maintain internet connection systems.”
That’s because big companies have placed millions billions of dollars of infrastructure to support this service. It’s right that they make money off of their investment.
And sorry about your State, but in my city, it’s not unknown.
Miami Beach has free WiFi service from the city government. So does parts of the City of South Miami. It’s early days in WiFi, no matter what netgeeks like us think.
You think ConEd’s electric services started the moment electricity powered people’s homes? No, it took them 20 years for the public to get it in large quantities.
Wait.
“Meraki will base the service on an existing project covering parts of the city, Free the Net, which has signed up 40,000 users over an area of 5 square kilometers since it began last March.”
I have a question. If it’s free, why do we have to sign up for it?
Only problem I see is that it’s all behind a NAT, so bye bye to running your own servers aka having “net freedom.”
Hmmm…solar powered repeaters!? No sun…No WiFi. I think i will continue “borrow” my neighbor’s unsecured Wifi signal.
pika- there’s a new invention these days, it’s called a BATTERY.
a WIFI repeater doesn’t need a lot of electricity, it can only broadcast a signal strong enough for a few dozen meters.
solar panels charge the battery all day, battery will last all night, at the very least.
i’m MUCH more concerned about the performance of the repeaters. 1mbps per user - on a system that supports a shared 54mbps at maximum signal strength, that also acts as the backbone, and needs to be able to support hundreds of live connections at a time. add to that wireless lag, and error correction at both the user AND backbone level.
hmmm…
why not deploy WIMAX, with local WIFI hotspots (which can be phased out, when WIMAX equipment becomes widespread)?
MUCH higher bandwidth and range - makes for a dramatically better backbone. the 100 fold increase in range makes it a hell of a lot easier to deploy, especially in a city that has “dead zones”. less routing means faster, less overhead crowded system, and it will probably be cheaper!