Meraki

Meraki was a company that provided products for large-scale, distributed wired and wireless networks. The company was started by two MIT PhD students, Sanjit Biswas and John Bicket, along with Hans Robertson. The company was based in part on the MIT Roofnet project and became part of Cisco Systems in December 2012.

History

Meraki was funded by Google and Sequoia Capital. The organization started in Mountain View, California in 2006, and was then located in San Francisco. Meraki employed people who worked on the MIT roofnet project.

In 2007, Meraki selected San Francisco for their community-based Free the Net campaign. They started putting gateway devices in the Lower Haight neighborhood to provide Internet access and giving away repeaters. In the first year of the project, growth of the network was primarily into the Mission District. By October 2007, they estimated 20,000 distinct users (ever connected) and about 5 terabytes of data transferred in this network. In July 2008, Meraki said 100,000 people in San Francisco used its 'Free the Net' service. Since then, Meraki discontinued this public service, though many access points remain active, but with no connection to the Internet.