Finally, an Internet solution I really dig… Meraki

For a long time I have watched various companies try and find a solution for delivering high speed internet across neighborhoods. I have seen folks bet on the last mile solutions. There was the wave of wiring neighborhoods and buildings to capture subscribers, the onset of various telephone, dsl, and cable companies buying this infrastructure thinking they could own the end user. That will not work.

Then there was wireless, and the onset of Wi-Fi which sought to get investors to jump on board. But Wi Fi has too weak of a signal and it has not provided the solution people want. The problem with all of the solutions so far, in my opinion, has been that everyone wants to own the internet connection and through this they think they can get rich from subscriber services. This will not work. Someone will build a better delivery too quickly, at a lower cost, and eat the current solution alive. Call it Creative Destruction if you wish.

What I thought would be a great idea was a peer to peer network creating a public and free (or inexpensive) network of wireless internet going from machine to machine. I had heard this was looked at on the level of your laptop, sending signals from one machine to another. But for whatever reason this never took off.

Now I read on Saturday that someone has the idea nailed down. Plus they have some backing from Google (which doesn’t hurt) and some beta’s out there. The company is called Meraki and they are making a small box that acts as a repeater for wireless signals. This is really no different than the basic theory of routers across the world that transfer our web requests from router to router, except this is wireless and you can put these little devices throughout a building or across a neighborhood.

Cool stuff, and I am signing up for the beta to test it out.

Sure, it will take a while to take off because you need multiple machines to get the web coverage across an area. But just like a fax machine, the first few took some time to take off and then once there was coverage it boomed.

Check out the article from the New York Times here and tell me what you think.

And don’t forget to sign up for the beta.. their website is here .