Meraki, a start-up that hopes to bring cheap Wi-Fi to the emerging world, has raised $20 million in a second round of funding.
The company, which grew out of a Ph.D. thesis at MIT, has created inexpensive routers and a back-end networking service that balances available bandwidth between the routers and users. The end result is that the available bandwidth is used more efficiently, according to Sanjit Biswas, Meraki's CEO and co-founder.
"There are a small number of Internet connections, but they are repeated by a large number of radios" in networks based on the company's equipment, Biswas explained.
More than 1,000 networks using Meraki's routers have been set up and one of the company's big power users is Google. The company, however, will primarily aim its products and services at customers in India, Latin America, and Africa. The existing infrastructure in these places is fairly minimal, price is a key consideration, and demand is booming.
All these factors work in the company's favor, he said. The company makes routers for indoor and outdoor environments and has also come up with one that gets power from solar panels.
The goal is to provide users with 1-megabit-per-second service in places like Brazil.
To showcase its technology, Meraki will give away approximately 10,000 to 15,000 of its wireless repeaters that, in concert, will create a free wireless network covering San Francisco. San Francisco sports a lot of geographic challenges, and remains home to a lot of Internet power users. Like a lot of emerging nations, San Francisco also suffers from a mind-boggling array of political and bureaucratic problems. (I live here. I know). Earthlink and Google gave up plans to build a municipal Wi-Fi network for the city.
Meraki has an advantage in this department in that it doesn't rely on political approval. It gives or sells repeaters to people, and they erect and manage the network.
Meraki has already issued free repeaters to residents in the Mission, Lower Haight, and Upper Market neighborhoods. Overall, this covers about 2 square miles of the city, and 40,000 people have logged onto the network, said Biswas.
This being San Francisco, there is an inordinate number of iPhones tapping into it. Over 1,000 iPhones have logged on, he said. Users tell Meraki that the speeds are better than the cellular Internet service provided by AT&T.
The existing San Francisco network is served by only "tens of megabits" worth of bandwidth from the Internet, not much in the aggregate. "Not everyone uses it at the same time," said Biswas.
Investors in the second round included existing investors like Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, and Northgate Capital.
It's not the amount that counts--it's the first few milliliters.
That's the word from Helen Lee, an associate professor at the University of Cambridge, who invented the FirstBurst, that device you see in her hands. It captures the first part of a male patient's urine sample and seals it off into a tube. Those initial milliliters are the ones doctors need for testing. Lee hopes to see the device get shipped into emerging markets to help health professionals. (She has also invented a device for rapidly testing for chlamydia.)
Helen Lee and the FirstBurst
(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET Networks)The FirstBurst testing has been fairly rigorous. Her group has set up a simulated bladder in a lab that can hold about as much liquid as someone who drank seven beers. Lee has also conducted tests at a local pub. They set up a curtain and asked for volunteers. You need to do real life testing, after all, she said.
"It doesn't matter if you are left handed or right handed," she said. "One of the real surprises has been that men have just as many problems with aim as women do."
Lee was invited to Buckingham Palace to receive and award and met Prince Philip, who had a number of questions too, particularly about the direction for approaching the device. No word on if he actually tested it.
Lee, who has also started a company called Diagnostics for the Real World to help commercialize the device, was in San Jose, Calif., this week to receive an award from the Tech Museum of Innovation.
The FirstBurst (the name just sort of came up in a conversation once and stuck) can't be used to avoid stops on a road trip, she emphasized. It only catches the first few milliliters. It's a question she gets a lot.
Inveneo's computers for emerging nations aren't' the cheapest I've seen. At $469 to $769, the computers (the price includes a LCD screen, the systems are actually some of the highest priced models out there.
The company, though, makes it up on lower cost of ownership and energy efficiency, which are even bigger problems overseas, it says co-founder Bob Marsh. The Communications Station, which includes a VoIP unit, runs on 22 watts at its peak. The Computing Station (no VoIP unit) tops at 18 watts. That's lower than most processors alone.
An Inveneo computer
(Credit: michael kanellos)Power outages remain common in India because people egularly steal electricity from the grid. In some places, donated computers have proved to be a big headache for recipients. The PCs come with CRT monitors, which are energy hogs.
"They had to buy $2000 worth of stuff to run their computers," he said.
The VoIP calling units in some of the computers also can work while the computer stays in sleep mode to further curb power. With Skype, the computer has to remain on, which consumes power. The VoIP unit runs on four watts.
Inveneo rigs up many of the systems with solar panels.
Although the price of the PCs is a bit startling, the company doesn't come across as an organization bent on profits. The employees go regularly to Africa and can tell you harrowing stories about AIDS and refugees in Mozambique and elsewhere. 27 percent of the residents in Mozambique are infected with HIV. Trucks are used to get large numbers of people to cemeteries for funerals.
Still, it's a tough sell. The company's PCs in some ways are similar in concept to, but cost more than, those coming from nComputing, started by former Emachines founder Steve Dukker.
So far, Inveneo has completed 22 deployments in six African nations. Most of the deployments have been for schools and charities. It is also working with Intel on long-distance WiFi trials in Uganda.
Researcher Ermanno Pietrosemoli has set what appears to be a new record for the longest communication link with Wi-Fi.
Pietrosemoli, president of the Escuela Latinoamerica de Redes (which means networking school of Latin America) established a Wi-Fi link between two computers located in El Aguila and Platillon Mountain, Venezuela. That's a distance of 382 kilometers, or 238 miles. He used technology from Intel, which is concocting its own long-range Wi-Fi equipment, and some off-the-shelf parts. Pietrosemoli gets about 3 megabits per second in each direction on his long-range connections.
Most Wi-Fi signals only go only a few meters before petering out. Conventional Wi-Fi transmitters, however, send signals in all directions. By directing the signal to a specific point, range can be increased.
Honing the signal, however, means that the receiver and transmitter have to be aligned. Trees, buildings and other objects that get between them can sever the link. The curvature of Earth, misalignment between the transmitter and receiver, as well as shaking and any sort of movement at the transmitting or receiving end can also impair the signal. (To ameliorate some of these factors, Intel has created a way to electrically steer the signal, which in turn increases bandwidth.)
Geography was on Pietrosemoli's side. El Aguila and Platillon Mountain sit in the Andes, which form fairly jagged peaks in this part of the range.
The old record was 310 kilometers. Swedish scientists made a link between a balloon and an Earth-bound station. We say "apparently" on Pietrosemoli's record, in case someone out there has set a better record about which we are unaware.
More details can be found in an article at the Web site for The Association for Progressive Communcations. (Inveneo, which is trying to bring PCs to emerging markets, told us about Pietrosemoli's achievement.)
Intel, along with organizations like Inveneo, are testing the feasibility of long-range Wi-Fi as a communication link in Uganda and other emerging nations. Long-range Wi-Fi isn't as robust at WiMax, but the towers cost a lot less. Some hobbyists have accomplished a long-range Wi-Fi connection with low bandwidth.
Similar experiments are being carried out in the United States as well. A long-range Wi-Fi link connects Intel Research's Berkeley Lab and a Sun Microsystems lab on the San Francisco Peninsula, more than 20 miles away.
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