The main argument is that they had a nice scalable open(able) platform when
they had the $49 Minis. They enticed everyone to get on board with a
pretty interface. Then they took the standard Mini and put advertising on
it, forcing you to either upgrade or stop using it. Now they are big, the
standard minis have automatic advertising, and if you don't like that you
can buy the $149 Pro model, so basically, you're taxed $100 if you don't
like their ads, when in reality the similar SOC unit with Open-Mesh from
Accton is less than $40 in quanities of 20 with no advertising, and soon to
have support for a billing option that uses your credit card gateway (i.e.
no 20% fee).
That said, I have a 120 unit building with about 20 Meraki Pro's with
billing turned on, that generates about $250-400 a month in revenue (usually
about 15-20 users a month @ $20 each), that I get a check in the mail
monthly, I never really do anything, signup is automatic, no servers
required. They send you an email (which could be email to SMS for a text
message) if a unit doesn't respond for 60 minutes. Their software shows
uptime, bandwidth usage, everything you could ask for pretty much.
I've had more stolen than fail, actually (velcro-secured back then). In
fact from October 2007 until now, I've never had one go bad but I've had 4
go missing.
- Original Message -
From: Rogelio [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: WISPA General List wireless@wispa.org
Sent: Monday, July 14, 2008 3:41 AM
Subject: [WISPA] Meraki called embarrassment to wi-fi
I overheard a WLAN engineer recently call Meraki an embarassment to
wi-fi. I was little suprised, as I've heard decent things about it,
considering how scalable it is for being a product that's easy for the
masses to implement.
Is there something I'm not getting? I've heard that the units break
down quite frequently (compared to other more expensive units), but
given the fact that they're so cheap, I would imagine the OPEX and CAPEX
numbers come about right, particularly for lower end apartment buildings.
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