shouting loudly

Thanks to a technology in development by two MIT students, you and your neighbors (or people in Delhi and their neighbors) may soon have a cheaper and easier way to connect to the internet.

Let’s say you’re on the town council in a rural area. Though you’d like to provide municipal wireless, you’ve been bemoaning the expense and quality of wireless technologies that could help you deploy a mesh wifi network. Meraki could provide a solution. As the Times explains:

Meraki Networks, a 15-employee start-up in Mountain View, Calif., has been field-testing Wi-Fi boxes that offer the prospect of providing an extremely inexpensive solution to the “last 10 yards” problem. It does so with a radical inversion: rather than starting from outside the house and trying to send signals in, Meraki starts from the inside and sends signals out, to the neighbors.

Some of those neighbors will also have Meraki boxes that serve as repeaters, relaying the signal still farther to more neighbors. The company equips its boxes with software that maintains a “mesh network,” which dynamically reroutes signals as boxes are added or unplugged, and as environmental conditions that affect network performance fluctuate moment to moment.

I’m interested to see how this works out; the company has indoor and outdoor wireless access point and repeaters, but they’re still in beta.

On a side note, I wonder how well suburban and urban broadband providers will tolerate selling service to an entire block for $35/month. My guess: not well. They might resort to throttling bandwidth, they might try to discriminate, and they might just cancel folks’ service contracts.

For semi-rural folks, though, this might help solve a substantial access gap that still remains in the US, no thanks to the profit motive. It also has tremendous potential to provide internet access in lesser-developed countries the same way that cell phones bypassed the need for fully deployed landline infrastructure.