
From "happy hacking" to "screw you" - the story of Meraki - nickb
http://virishi.net/from-happy-hacking-screw-you-story-meraki
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bootload
_"... We immediately ordered 9 of the first beta units to try out. The
technology was cheap ($50/unit) and it worked but what prevented us from going
any further with it was the pricing model that they decided to adopt -
$5/node/month for access to the "dashboard" - the real-time monitoring
software that they were developing for managing the networks. ..."_

One of the bits I didn't like about the Meraki model was the requirement for
all traffic to go back through the Meraki _"back-end"_ service. You might get
_free_ access but at the price of centralised control. Google & Sequoia are
backing this effort so you have to figure how the "do-no-evil" bit fits in
with the centralisation of _"network analysis"_ ~
<http://meraki.com/oursolution/hostedservices/>

One other interesting tidbit is RM is a technical advisor ~
<http://meraki.com/about/>

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pjf
I'm a great fan of mesh networks, but...

How using 802.11a/g to build mesh networks of tens or houndreds of nodes is
going to scale in a few years, when more people will need e.g. a 10Mbps+
access to Internet? I know - in developing countries there is no Internet
access at all, so _any_ is better than nothing, but I wonder what will happen
with all the deployed gear in US in a few years.

The radio has to be software-defined and flexible enough to improve it without
replacing the whole gear, IMHO. We have to free the air to let such projects
like Meraki build the Internet which won't suck in just a few years.

~~~
ph0rque
Sounds like a business opportunity to develop what was Meraki's original
vision, with improved hardware and a software-defined radio.

------
wmf
The $50 price was obviously unsustainable; consider that a high-volume, non-
mesh WRT54G sells for ~$45. The other parts of the story are certainly
worrying, though. I wonder if this was driven by a change in management or if
Meraki just said to themselves, "time to stop fooling around with open source
and make some money".

~~~
netstumbler
I agree - we thought about doing a VoIP startup last year that involved some
hardware similar to Meraki, and our costs came our to around $50 in the best
case (not including the startup costs).

Looks like the management team is the same founding team of MIT PhDs, so my
guess is they realized they needed to make money to stay alive and that open-
source hobbyists aren't a good market in the first place.

