[MLB-WIRELESS] Meraki news

[Dan Flett]

Hi Guys,
 
I'm in Adelaide at the moment and went to an Air-stream meeting the other
day.  They've got a nice network here and are very proactive about getting
sponsorship, sites for nodes, and developing new software.

Simon Knight from Adelaide tells me that the Meraki Beta program is almost
over.  The good news is that the post-beta retail price will not rise.  So
the Indoor Meraki Mini should be US$49 and the Outdoor unit US$99.  They
seem the best device we've seen so far for doing what we want to do - wether
you prefer mesh or point-to-point links.  OpenWRT support is experimental at
the moment though.  Personally, I'd like to buy lots of these - maybe a few
at a time, load the Melbourne Wireless Freifunk firmware onto them (once we
can make it work on the Meraki) with the MWHotspot package, and just leave
them at friend's houses. :)

I also think we could consider using them as wireless advertising boards.
With the explosion of Centrino laptops and other WiFi-enabled devices, lots
of people (non-geeks) log on to open APs now and try to leech Internet
access.  We could approach businesses with a live demonstration of how a
Meraki can be used to include their advertisement on our captive portal
page.  Those businesses may be more keen to allow us to put wireless
hardware on their site if they get something tangible in return.

The Atheros radios in the Merakis have good virtual SSID support, so they
can run in multiple modes at the same time.  For instance, they could run in
Adhoc mode with the SSID melbournewireless.org.au for the mesh uplink, and
in AP mode with the SSID of "Insert Business Name Here".  Anyone who logs on
to either SSID would get our Captive Portal page.

Just some thoughts... :)

Dan