San Francisco Gets Second Wi-Fi Option

A small Mountain View, Calif. based company isn't waiting for EarthLink and Google to iron out contractual details to provide free Wi-Fi in the city of San Francisco.

Meraki would use volunteers who would manage routers themselves to maintain its network, somewhat similar to efforts by Spain's Fon. It would give its routers away for free to those who would agree to maintain them.

"Our goal is to show the world there's a new way to provide Internet access to the next billion people, and we thought San Francisco would be a great place to build a large network where we can better understand how to build community networks, deploy new features and get feedback from regular users," the company said in a blog post in March on the effort.

At that time, Meraki's focus was on the Mission, Castro, Alamo Square and Duboce Park areas of San Francisco. However, the company says it is now ready to start expanding its network to other areas of the city.

Like Fon, the company will look to volunteers to share their broadband connections to make the network a reality. However, Meraki has also struck agreements with broadband providers to help provide bandwidth for the network.

Currently, Meraki offers an indoor version of its router for $49, and an outdoor version for $99. In addition, it supplies free software which helps network administrators manage their wireless networks.