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" <[email protected]> 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. > > > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > WISPA Wants You! Join today! > http://signup.wispa.org/ > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- > > WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] > > Subscribe/Unsubscribe: > http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless > > Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/ > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wants You! Join today! http://signup.wispa.org/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- WISPA Wireless List: [email protected] Subscribe/Unsubscribe: http://lists.wispa.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless Archives: http://lists.wispa.org/pipermail/wireless/
