outdoor repeater

seaweedsteve hath wroth:

Meraki is a commercial version of MIT Roofnet. See:

You might find this article of interest. Note the packet loss (delivery probability) and thruput numbers.

Single radio mesh networks doth suck.

Aha. Same people from MIT, I see. Well, no doubt they are a smart bunch. Maybe they will get something good together.

I was wondering if they had gotten around the single radio repeater problems. Looks like not much, but I'm sure it helps that they have all matched sets that they are tweaking to work together. I see that they don't have WPA yet, but plan to. That would be a breakthrough, no? If it worked reliably.

On their forums, customers talk about re-starting a lot. Uh-huh.

Seems like they (Meraki) do have a good plan, though. They seem to provide the monitoring and hot-spot software and everything, no programming skills needed, $60-100 per unit. Of course they are charging 20% off every dollar the administrator bills. That's where they will make their money if it takes hold as a system.

How much more would it have cost for them to set these boxes up with two radios? $20 more per unit? Or is it not that simple?

Steve

seaweedsteve hath wroth:

I again call to your attention the web page with the performance summary of the MIT Roofnet system. It's not very impressive and probably not ready for massive deployment with an average packet loss of 50% at 1Mbit/sec.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. (Albert Einstein, Rita Mae Brown, and Rudyard Kipling).

Oh, you want reliability too? Well, you're not going to get that from even single hop wireless, much less from mesh. There are just too many sources of interference, too many environmental problems, and too much abuse to make that happen. Wireless, by its very nature is unreliable. Now, you can trade other things for reliablity, such as trading speed, range, features, and latency, but the consumer oriented wireless market, reliability is the very last requirement.

Most of the wireless mesh vendors offer WPA and WPA2. I know Tropos and BelAir do.

Different problem, methinks. It's based on the Netgear WGT634U, which seems to have some "issues". I don't know the details so I won't dig deeper. If they had a variety of hardware platforms, it might be easier to assign the blame:

I don't think it's the RoofNet firmware as it's based on OpenWRT, which is quite reliable.

It's the lowest cost version of consumer mesh networks that has bombed badly in the past. The last big deployment was when Nokia bought Rooftop Networks and tried to sell it to ISP's.

The price is lower and it's being sold directly instead of to ISP's, but otherwise, it's deja vu.

Nothing is simple in wireless. A 2nd MiniPCI card inside the box will add about $50 in hardware costs. However, it will also require contention logic, antenna combining, RF isolation, and *MAJOR* changes to the routeing algorithm and MAC layer code. For example, when Tropos went from their single radio 5210 to their dual radio 5320, they also added substantial firmware features, such as the ability to use either radio as a backhaul, dynamically. It also increases network management complexity. Anyway, as I recall, the large quanity prices went from about $1,200 per single radio poletop, to about $2,000 for the dual radio version. I'm guessing on the prices.

Router overview:

Tropos 5210 (one radio):

Tropos 5320 (two radios):

General mesh article on the one or two radio issue:

On Sat, 09 Jun 2007 12:46:43 -0700, seaweedsteve wrote in :

A greedy, premature bunch.

John Navas hath wroth:

Greedy? They're selling their mesh nodes for $50 and their solar powered repeaters for $100. That's giving them away. The may be financially suicidal, but far from greedy.

As to premature, methinks they're a bit late, as Nokia/Rooftop was doing roughly the same thing years ago, and bombed.

Oops... I'm late.

On Wed, 13 Jun 2007 14:43:00 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote in :

That's called buying a market, just like the dot-bomb doofuses.

Greedy as in rushing to market, hoping to capitalize on a buyout or IPO.

Bet they were already browsing the car catalogs.

Premature because it's not really ready for prime time.

Nokia/Rooftop was pre-premature, and wasn't the only such way early dumb idea.

Have they actually quoted a price as all references I have seen are $99 dollar for the outdoor version with no price quoted for the "Solar Power Kit"

will be set this summer but the Meraki Solar will clearly be the most affordable option on the market

I couldn't find any ref to the Meraki Outdoor on the FCC website so have they just used a "Weather Proofed " cased version of the mini? Mini FCC ID UDX-MERAKI-MINI

That's giving them away. The may be

kev hath wroth:

No quotes yet. I scraped the $50 price off this article:

Of course, it might be higher but is still a bargain.

Hmmm.... You're right. There's only one device listed on the FCC ID web pile under "UDX".

Changing the power source, especially if that power source has active components, requires re-certification. However, the outdoor version looks like just some repackaging, which if it contains RF shielding, does require re-certification. Sorry, but I don't have any inside info or knowledge of pending applications.

Hmmm.... 3am and I have a cloud of bugs orbiting the desk lamp. Summer is here.

Seems as though they are doing some maintenance and I can't get access. However I think the mini had very flexible power requirements so that it could be run from batteries and that it also had non-802.3af POE.

However, the outdoor version

kev hath wroth:

It's back. I was up until about 3:30AM last night. A fairly large number of web sites were down for maintenance or backup. I never really noticed until last night. This is very bad news for my nocturnal hacking.

Well, the "Modular Approval Request" should have itemized the various options with seperate certifications for the power sources. Nothing listed. If you dig through the various major brand router pages, you'll find suppliments to the original type certification where they change the brand or type of wall wart or the antenna. The Meraki outside photos show a switching 7.5v 1A DC wall wart, which kinda suggests that PoE is not built-in.

If you look at what they call an "Operational Description" it refers to a 4.5-18V DC i/p and it also mentions POE support (pages 8/9)

kev hath wroth:

Huh? I downloaded that URL and got a one page document with no mention of PoE.

I read through the user manual to see if I missed something. It says: "Note: the Meraki Mini Module uses a non-standard voltage of 4.5-18V." which is nice to have such a wide range regulator. The picture also shows a "3.3v serial port" connector, which is probably a JTAG port suitable for hacking.

I would like to blame it on anything other than incompetence but I can't

should have been pages 8 and 9 of the user manual.