Digital Domain

Wireless Internet for All, Without the Towers

Illustration by James Yang

By RANDALL STROSS
Published: February 4, 2007
THESE still are early days for the Internet, globally speaking. One billion people online; five billion to
go.

The next billion to be connected are living in homes that are physically close to an Internet gateway.
They await a solution to the famous “last mile” problem: extending affordable broadband service to
each person’s doorstep.
Here in the United States, 27 percent of the population lacks access to the Internet, according to a study
completed last year by the Pew Internet and American Life Project. Among those who do have access,
about 30 percent still rely on slow dial-up connections. The last mile for households with no or slow
connections may be provided by radio signals sent out by transmitters perched atop street lights, as
hundreds of cities have rolled out municipal Wi-Fi networks, or are in the process of doing so.
The impulse behind these projects is noble. It’s a shame, however, that lots of street lamps and lots of
dollars — a typical deployment in an urban setting will run $75,000 to $125,000 a square mile, just to
install the equipment — do not really solve the last-mile problem.
If you’re sitting with your laptop at an outside cafe, you’ll be happy with the service. But if you happen
to be at home, you realize that service to the doorstep is not enough: you still need to buy equipment to
bolster the signal and solve the “last mile plus 10 more yards” problem — that is, getting coverage
indoors.
Wi-Fi signals do not bend, and you usually can’t get much of a useful bounce from them, either.
Because Wi-Fi uses unlicensed bands of the radio spectrum, by law it must rely on low-power
transmitters, which reduce its ability to penetrate walls. Travel-round-the-world shortwave, this ain’t.
Trying to cover a broad area with Wi-Fi radio transmitters set atop street lights brings to mind a fad of
the 1880s: attempts to light an entire town with a handful of arc lights on high towers. But overeager
city boosters around the country soon discovered that shadows obscured large portions of their cities,
and the lighting was not as useful as had been expected. Municipal Wi-Fi on streetlamps, another
experiment with top-down delivery, may run a similarly short-lived — and needlessly expensive —
course.
WiMax, which will be a high-power version of the tower approach, comes in two flavors: mobile,
which has not yet been certified, and fixed, which is theoretically well suited for residential
deployment. Unfortunately, it’s pricey. Peter Bell, a research analyst at TeleGeography Research in
Washington, said fixed WiMax would not be able to compete against cable and DSL service: “It makes
more economic sense in semirural areas that have no broadband coverage.”
An intriguingly inexpensive alternative has appeared: a Wi-Fi network that is not top-down but rather
ground-level, peer-to-peer. It relies not on $3,500 radio transmitters perched on street lamps by
professional installers but instead on $50 boxes that serve, depending upon population density, more
than one household and can be installed by anyone with the ease of plugging in a toaster.
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.
At this time last year, two of Meraki’s co-founders — Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket — were still
Ph.D. students at M.I.T., pursuing academic research on wireless mesh networks in the course of
building Roofnet, an experimental network that covered about one-third of Cambridge, Mass., and
offered residents free service.
Last year, Google invited Mr. Biswas to give a presentation about his experience providing wireless
Internet service to low-income communities. At the time, Google was testing its first municipal Wi-Fi
network in its hometown, Mountain View, Calif., using transmitters attached to street lamps.
After Mr. Biswas’s talk, a Google engineer told him that people using Google’s network said they could
get online at home only by holding their laptops against a window. Mr. Biswas said he was not
surprised. Using municipal Wi-Fi for residential coverage, he said, was “the equivalent of expecting
street lamps to light everyone’s homes.”
Mr. Biswas and Mr. Bicket realized that their mesh-network gear designed for residential use could
avoid that problem, and hasten the extension of Internet access worldwide. They founded Meraki, took
a leave of absence from M.I.T. and, along with a third co-founder, Hans Robertson, moved to Silicon
Valley. In short order, Google and then Sequoia Capital, one of Google’s original venture capital
backers, invested in Meraki.
Wireless Internet for All, Without the Towers
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Published: February 4, 2007

(Page 2 of 2)
Moore’s Law, with its regular doubling of transistors on a single silicon chip, makes possible the
miracle of a Meraki “mini,” as the company calls its basic product for the home. It contains a Wi-Fi
router-on-a-chip, combined with the same microprocessor and same memory that formed the heart of a
Silicon Graphics workstation 10 years ago. These components are now cheap enough today to be
included in a box that sells for $49.

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The fact that 200 million Wi-Fi chips will be manufactured this year leads to economies of scale that
will drive down the price of extremely intelligent network equipment. Meraki’s products are still being
tested, but word-of-mouth has attracted 15,000 users in 25 countries.
One early adopter was Michael Burmeister-Brown, a director of NetEquality, a nonprofit in Portland,
Ore., that provides free Internet access to low-income neighborhoods. He had not been impressed by
Portland’s municipal Wi-Fi service. Because the Wi-Fi transmitter has to be both close and within
unobstructed view, the limitations brought to Mr. Burmeister-Brown’s mind the sign on the back of 18-
wheel trucks: “If you can’t see my mirror, I can’t see you.”
In Portland, the access points were installed only at every other intersection in residential areas —
creating an “I can’t see you” problem. MetroFi, the service provider, advises residents who are not
close to a transmitter to buy additional equipment to pull in the signal, with a starting price of $119 —
and that is without the “professional installation” option.
For NetEquality, Mr. Burmeister-Brown decided to try out the Meraki equipment in several
neighborhoods. In the largest, consisting of about 400 apartments, five DSL lines were used to feed 100
Meraki boxes, which cover the complex with a ratio of one box to every four apartments. Each box
both receives the signal and passes it along, albeit at diminished strength. For an initial investment of
about $5,000, or $13 a household, the complex can offer Internet access whose operating costs work
out to about $1 a household a month.
The bandwidth can match DSL service, but here it is throttled down a bit to deter bandwidth-hogging
downloads. Nonetheless, Mr. Burmeister-Brown says everyone is able to enjoy Web browsing with
what he describes as “really snappy response.” The sharing of signals among neighbors does not
compromise privacy if standard Wi-Fi security protocols are switched on.
Meraki’s products are not yet for sale, and its networks have not been tested with extensive deployment
across a large city. Nonetheless, the intrinsic advantages of its grass-roots approach, with next-to-
nothing expenditures for both equipment and operations, are impossible to ignore.
MR. BISWAS says there are about 800 million personal computers in the world, but only 280 million
are connected. The rest are “stuck in the 1980s” — close to being connected, but not quite.
Meraki does not wish to go into the Internet service provider business itself, but it aspires to equip any
interested nontechnical person to become a “micro” service provider for his or her local community. If
the provider wishes to use advertising to cover costs rather than charge an access fee, little would be
needed in order to cover the minimal outlays for equipment and operations.
This low-cost network model offers the prospect of broadband service reaching inside many more
households. One billion and one. One billion and two. One billion and three ... .