Municipal WiFi is not dead - yet!
And proof is that Meraki networks, that we’ve been following for quite some time now, has raised an amazing 20M USD from Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, Northgate Capital and other previous investors (that was a 5M Series A with angels and Google).
Meraki has designed a small router which looks alot like the Fonera from Fon but relies on Meshed networking to provide a low cost pervasive WiFi network coverage. They have been working in the San-Francisco area for some time now and with that fund raise they will expand it to cover the full city of San-Francisco offering an ad-based free Internet service.They already have about 40 000 daily connections which is not bad…
I’m really curious to see if they can make a real business out of local ad services. Anyway they already have a real business model as their main income comes mostly from revenue share with large telcos for managing their network.
Technorati Tags: meraki
Have a look at http://www.ilesansfil.org/. Île sans fil has 150 hotspots in Montreal and more than 55.000 users. Last but not least, it’s totally free access. Guess what is the business model?
Zelaurent
8 Jan 08 at 10:07 pm