Meraki helped San Francisco celebrate One Web Day on September 22nd by helping provide free wireless internet access in affordable housing units in the San Francisco’s Tenderloin District. With the help of a great team of volunteers from SF Connect including some folks from Open DNS we were able to complete installations in twelve apartment buildings throughout the neighborhood. The Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Committee and SF Connect provide a number of great job training, computer usage and benefits qualification workshops in the tech centers that are being set up in some of these locations. Dozens of programs exist to provide training, computer equipment and ongoing support but the stumbling block often proves to be the prohibitively high recurring cost of internet access. Free the Net seemed like the perfect solution and Meraki was happy to provide wireless access as part of our San Francisco wireless network.

At the end of the day we were able to light up all twelve buildings with wireless and will continue to work to improve the installations and make sure every resident has access to the internet. It’s worth pointing out that a team of relatively inexperienced volunteers was able to deploy nearly fifty pieces of Meraki hardware in just eight hours! An estimated 1,000 tenants will benefit from this service which would not have been possible without the innovative mesh solution that Meraki offers.

Go to onewebday.org

- Posted by Lois Schonberger