San Francisco to Get a Second Chance at Citywide Wi-Fi

In August, Earthlink dropped out of the municipal wi-fi project in San Francisco, based on a lot of things, not the least of which were its financial issues at the time. But SF may be getting a second chance.

Meraki, a start-up with funding by Google (ironic, since Google was working with Earthlink on the original project), issued a press release on Friday announcing that it will deploy a next-generation, city-wide wireless access network in San Francisco providing free, broadband Internet access for every neighborhood by the end of 2008.

This would be an extension of the "Free the Net" project launched last year in a two-square mile area of the city, currently covering (according to their site) slightly more than 40,000 people at the time of this writing.

Here's the part the city of San Francisco will appreciate the most:

Meraki will fund the entire cost for establishing the free network across the city, as part of an effort to showcase for other communities around the world how the company's technology can allow the creation of city-wide access networks at a fraction of current costs. No public funds will be used to build this new Meraki wireless network in San Francisco.

The biggest obstacle to this may be the requirement to get homeowners and commercial buildings to put to put free repeaters on their roofs. While these will be provided free, they will need hundreds of these for the network to work.