[wsfii-discuss] fon/meraki/community meshes differentiated .. (was: Re: Fwd: wireless connectivity.. Is802.11n the end of ethernet?)

[Nick Hatch]

Vickram Crishna wrote:
>
> Someone mentioned acquiring Meraki hardware on eBay or somewhere and
> flashing new firmware, this also sounds very close to piracy, rather
> than a clean honest approach. If Meraki stuff is priced low, it is
> because the company expects to recover its money from the inbuilt
> functioning of a Meraki mesh, not a clean Open mesh. Scamming them,
> taking advantage of their chosen architecture, does not ring right,
> and in fact if done on a large scale will only lead to closure for
> Meraki.
(Hi all, I recently discovered this list. Some great discussion going on
here.)

Meraki is not selling their Meraki Mini at a loss -- they make a small
profit on the hardware sale alone. [1]  The costs stay low because
they're using a mostly off-the-shelf design. [2]

Although Meraki takes a cut from billing using their system, I don't
think they're depending on this for their business model. Meraki
provides two options: MAC/WPA/account based access-control, or the
"monetize" route where you bill users. The monetize feature is still in
beta, and is not the default.

Meraki has always supported hacking their devices: root access can be
gained easily and they encourage firmware mods. So why the proprietary
behavior? One, their mesh layer is, well, proprietary. The answer I've
heard when Meraki is asked about external captive portals,
authentication, etc is that they want to preserve the "end-to-end"
nature of the system. Vendor lock-in? Sure, maybe. I'm sure there are
technical limitations here too. In the interview linked to above ([1]),
Meraki co-founder Sanjit Biswas makes a point that much of the system
intelligence lies in Meraki's servers, not the individual nodes.

I just recently started messing around with the Meraki Mini, and so far
I'm very impressed with the system. I do wish they would run
independently of Meraki's servers and give an API for external
authentication and reporting (if they did, I'd place an order in for 100
units). However, the wireless market is a big one and I can't fault them
for their turnkey focus, especially if they aren't going to knock the
soldering iron out of my hand.

[1] http://www.wifinetnews.com/archives/007689.html
[2] http://tech.am/2006/10/06/autopsy-of-a-fonera/

-Nick