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Hi all,

> From: John Valenti <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: Re: [WISPA] Alternative to Meraki mesh??
> Date: Thu, 25 Oct 2007 15:22:35 -0400
> To: WISPA General List <[email protected]>
> X-Mailer: Apple Mail (2.752.3)
> 
> Anthony,
> 
> The CUWIN project has their mesh software running on Meraki:
>       http://www.cuwin.net/pr/2006/meraki     (but this is a year old and 
>       I  haven't heard much about it since...)
> 
> CUWIN is the Champaign / Urbana Illinois community wireless group  
> (started at UIUC I think).

CUWiN is indeed working on a Meraki port -- the initial port is finished, but
we're still working on miniaturization.  Meanwhile, I'm here in Austria meeting
up with folks from FunkFeuer and FreiFunk -- who've been doing fantastic open
source mesh wireless R&D work here in Europe for years (but that most folks
don't know about back in the states).  I've been pulling together a global
alliance of open source mesh wireless groups to create the Open Source Wireless
Coalition (see OSWC.net).  Now that a number of FOSS technologies have matured,
the goal of OSWC is to take best-of-breed components from each of these projects
into a single turn-key solution.  For the nay-sayers out there, these networks
cover enormous regions (e.g., Djursland in Denmark, Guifi.net in Spain) and
entire metro areas (e.g., Berlin, Leipzig, Vienna, Graz), have scalability to
hundreds of nodes, are using completely free and open source software, and have
been operational for years.  My goal this year is to help transport these
technologies stateside and get a critical mass of users together who want to
deploy and develop them.

> What's wrong with Meraki that you would trust some other company over  
> them?

The only reason folks don't know more about them is that they don't have the PR
and marketing money of the major corporations.  Currently, there's a lot of
anger in the open source community towards Meraki, because they took an open
source project (Roofnet) and closed it in a proprietary system while, at the
same time, not giving anything back to the community that helped develop the
technologies.  I think a lot of folks don't trust them because the good will and
original goals of the founders appear to have been subsumed by the dictates of
their venture capital funders.

In solidarity,

- --Sascha Meinrath
Research Director, Wireless Future Program
New America Foundation

Founder & Executive Director
CUWiN Foundation

> -John
> 
> 
> On October 25, at 10:24 AM October 25, Anthony Lemons wrote:
> 
>> Anyone know if there is an equipment line along the lines of what  
>> Meraki is selling?  I've been checking out Meraki and like the low  
>> cost, self install, mesh technology, etc. but I do not like that  
>> you will be depending on their backend (Dashboard) software. Are  
>> there any other companies offering products along this line?
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