Kann die "Muni-WiFi"-Vision jetzt verwirklicht werden? Evtl. mit open-mesh.com?

Woher kommt open-mesh.com?

Die Ursprungsidee wurde 2005 im berühmten MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology in  Cambridge, Massachusetts/US) mit dem ursprünglichen Roofnet (also Dachnetz) Experiment. geboren. Die Jungs dort  gründeten ein StartUp, genannt "Meraki" und hatten damit auf Anhieb grossen Erfolg. Zunächst mit dem Etikett der Philantropie versehen, änderte sich die stundentische Einstellung mit dem Eintritt ins real-business recht schnell. Knall auf Fall machten Sie nämlich aus Ihrem zunächst offenen Unternehmensansatz einen "closed Shop" und verlangten heftig kritisierte jährlich zu erneuernde Abgaben. Das tun sie noch - bis heute. Cisco hat das Unternehmen mittlerweile unter seine Fittiche gesteckt und einverleibt.

Dem wollten einige Leute nicht so ohne witeres tatenlos zusehen. So entstand open-mesh.com, als Gegenbewegung sozusagen. Doch auch hier ziehen die Preise mittlerweile deutlich an. 20 Mitarbeiter wollen eben durchgefüttert werden, auf Dauer. Auch wenn der Boss vielfacher Millionär ist. - Lt. Eigenangabe wächst die Zahl der mit der eigenen (noch) kostenfreien Admin cloudsoftware verwalteten Netze heftig. Aktuell sollen es bereits über 80.000 sein. Die Kundenkontakte gehen in die Millionen. Und die Skalierung setzt sich weiter fort.

Wer mehr Infos haben möchte, findet diese zB hier:

• http://www.daveenjoys.com/2013/05/06/interview-with-open-mesh/
• http://www.dailywireless.org/2008/03/11/the-open-mesh-revolution/
• http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Open-Mesh-Picks-Up-Where-Meraki-Left-Off-92532
• Michael Burmeister-Brown, President of Open-Mesh 
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/michael-burmeister-brown-44aa8a21

Read parts ofthe whole stories:

"Michael became a co-founder of NetEquality seeking to ensure that internet access was available for everyone – especially low-income communities. Originally, NetEquality was associated with Meraki, but when Meraki boosted their prices and abandoned the low-cost market, Michael decided to step in and found Open-Mesh.

Laut Linkedin.com arbeiten dort ca. 20 Personen. Der CEO wollte 2013 die Zahlen wohl noch nicht bekannt geben und schwurbelte entsprechend:

Michael: I am not sure of the exact count – we are a geographically diverse company with two separate teams in Germany and others in Italy, Canada, China, and of course, the United States.

Dave: For organizations interested in Open-Mesh, how do they know your product will work and that you’ll be around in the future?

Michael: Our sales have doubled each year for the last three years and we have just under 40,000 networks managed on Cloudtrax. Feel free to reach out in a couple months and I’ll be able to share more information on new offerings – especially regarding Cloudtrax."
"

"Open-Mesh Corporate Profile"

Open-Mesh is a low profile organization. Unlike many sites that have detailed information about their corporate officers posted on the site, Open-Mesh has none. Go over to CrunchBase and you’ll find a bare-bones company profile. There is no company page on LinkedIn and searching for Open-Mesh employees surfaces only two.

[Anm.: https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/f?type=all&keywords=%22open-mesh .Es sind mittlerweile mehr.]

One could take this as a sign that the company is small and unstable, but when it comes to technical companies this is often times the sign that employees are pretty hard-core geeks, who spend more time coding and building, than they do marketing themselves. It seems to be the latter in the case of Open-Mesh.

Luckily, finding information on Open-Mesh President Michael Burmeister-Brown, who provided the above interview, is a little easier than finding information on employees generally – and Burmeister-Brown’s background is nothing to laugh at.

Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek tells us that Michael founded Central Point Software in 1981 where he served as President, Chief Executive Officer (CEO), and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) until 1991. Central Point would be acquired by Symantec in 1994 for $60 million.

In 1992 Michael founded another company – Second Nature Software  – and began serving as its president. This company had an environmental focus and committed all its profits to The Nature Conservancy – over $2.5 million. It appears to have closed its doors as of 2012.

Michael founded another company, NetControls.com in the mid-1990’s and in 1997 this company was acquired by Yahoo!. Michael continued at Yahoo for five years working on Yahoo’s News Ticker and Yahoo Messenger products.

He has also served as a Director of WebTrends since October 1996. I am unsure whether this position is ongoing – Bloomberg doesn’t clarify.^[1]

Michael became a co-founder of NetEquality seeking to ensure that internet access was available for everyone – especially low-income communities. Originally, NetEquality was associated with Meraki, but when Meraki boosted their prices and abandoned the low-cost market, Michael decided to step in and found Open-Mesh.

Want a face to put to that name? Check out Oregon Live’s article here and scroll down the page halfway."

"Roofnet was an experimental 802.11b/g mesh network developed by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Research included link-level measurements of 802.11, finding high-throughput routes in the face of lossy links, link adaptation, and developing new protocols which take advantage of radio’s unique properties (ExOR). The software developed for this project is available free as open source."

"Our story began in 2005, when we noticed a growing gap in the education and opportunities available between kids who had WiFi at home and kids who didn’t. The digital divide was real, and we wanted to help do something about it. 

We needed to find a solution for low-income housing that was easy to deploy, easy to manage, incredibly reliable and didn’t cost a lot. Ideally, it could be installed by a housing manager or the community itself. We thought it should form itself, heal itself and just simply work. 

We met some guys from MIT with a project called Roofnet. Their solution was easy to deploy and didn’t cost a lot, but it was impossible to manage at scale. 

So we built a solution where access points would connect to a central server to report usage and get settings changes. Cloud-managed networking was born.

When the Roofnet team founded a company [Meraki] (later acquired by a much larger company [Cisco]) and pivoted to serve the enterprise exclusively, we were back at square one. 

Rather than try to find another partner, we realized we could make a bigger dent in the world if we managed the process from end to end—from hardware design to manufacturing to distribution and cloud management— and create an open platform that others could build on.

The same drive that kicked off our humble journey in 2005 continues today: build great products that just work and make enterprise-level WiFi accessible to everyone."