"... We immediately ordered 9 of the first beta units to try out. The technology was cheap ($50/unit) and it worked but what prevented us from going any further with it was the pricing model that they decided to adopt - $5/node/month for access to the "dashboard" - the real-time monitoring software that they were developing for managing the networks. ..."
One of the bits I didn't like about the Meraki model was the requirement for all traffic to go back through the Meraki "back-end" service. You might get free access but at the price of centralised control. Google & Sequoia are backing this effort so you have to figure how the "do-no-evil" bit fits in with the centralisation of "network analysis" ~ http://meraki.com/oursolution/hostedservices/
How using 802.11a/g to build mesh networks of tens or houndreds of nodes is going to scale in a few years, when more people will need e.g. a 10Mbps+ access to Internet? I know - in developing countries there is no Internet access at all, so any is better than nothing, but I wonder what will happen with all the deployed gear in US in a few years.
The radio has to be software-defined and flexible enough to improve it without replacing the whole gear, IMHO. We have to free the air to let such projects like Meraki build the Internet which won't suck in just a few years.
The $50 price was obviously unsustainable; consider that a high-volume, non-mesh WRT54G sells for ~$45. The other parts of the story are certainly worrying, though. I wonder if this was driven by a change in management or if Meraki just said to themselves, "time to stop fooling around with open source and make some money".
I agree - we thought about doing a VoIP startup last year that involved some hardware similar to Meraki, and our costs came our to around $50 in the best case (not including the startup costs).
Looks like the management team is the same founding team of MIT PhDs, so my guess is they realized they needed to make money to stay alive and that open-source hobbyists aren't a good market in the first place.
One of the bits I didn't like about the Meraki model was the requirement for all traffic to go back through the Meraki "back-end" service. You might get free access but at the price of centralised control. Google & Sequoia are backing this effort so you have to figure how the "do-no-evil" bit fits in with the centralisation of "network analysis" ~ http://meraki.com/oursolution/hostedservices/
One other interesting tidbit is RM is a technical advisor ~ http://meraki.com/about/