In celebration of spring, we’ve added some new colors to Meraki
Dashboard’s device pages. Our connectivity graphs now show much more
information about device status through time. In particular:

• Gateway devices, which are connected directly to the Internet,
  appear as darker green. A device with an intermittent Internet connection may
  change shade as it switches between repeater and gateway. For example,
  this node came online at around 19:10, but its Internet connection came up
  about an hour later:
  
• New orange and yellow colors show times when a device can reach
  Dashboard, but cannot be used by clients. This can happen, for instance,
  when your upstream DNS server appears down, or when repeaters can’t find a
  gateway in your network.
  

In summary, green shows when devices are usable by clients,
orange and yellow show when devices are unusable by clients but can
reach Meraki, and red shows when devices cannot even reach Meraki.
Different shades distinguish between gateway and repeater and other
important states. If you forget what a color means, move the mouse over a
large connectivity graph and a tooltip will tell you.

This functionality depends on our latest firmware, so you may not see
the new colors until your network automatically upgrades. We hope this
more detailed information will help you debug your network faster and
easier.

- posted by Eddie Kohler

We often get asked the question, “How far apart can our nodes be and still have a good connection?”.  While nothing is a substitute for actually trying the link out, we’ve created a Range Calculator to help plan your networks.  This tool can help predict distances between nodes, and help you decide what type of antenna to use to cover the distance that you want.

The Range Calculator is compatible with all of our products and accessories.  It is also customizable for antennas that we do not stock and has options to allow you to pick your radio transmit power so that you can keep regulatory domain compliance in mind.  For actual installation, we calculate the required antenna height above obstructions to keep a clear line of sight.  We hope you find our Range Calculator as useful as we do!

- posted by Nancy Sun

Meraki has recently released support for the Wireless Multi Media (WMM) and 802.11e Quality of Service (QoS) standards. These standards improve the performance of certain bandwidth intensive and latency sensitive applications over wireless networks.

WMM provides four different traffic classes: voice, video, best effort, and background. Devices that support WMM and request a higher level of service, such as WiFi handsets, will receive higher priority on Meraki networks, improving their performance.

Meraki also supports WMM power save mode. Many mobile devices that support WiFi are prone to excessive battery drain. WMM power save improves on the standard 802.11 power save poll mode by allowing devices to “sleep” differently when they receive critical vs. non-critical packets. Devices that support WMM power save should experience extended battery life when using a Meraki network.

For the more technically inclined, Meraki supports the EDCA and TXOP protocols. U-APSD is supported on most platforms as well.

- Posted by Xiao Yu

Many of our customers who use splash-based access control on their networks have requested the ability to prevent multiple simultaneous logins on their network. We’re pleased to announce that this feature is now available on Meraki networks using either the “specific users” or RADIUS-based splash page authentication methods.

This setting is called “Prevent Multiple Simultaneous Logins”, and it’s located on the “Advanced Settings” page in Meraki Dashboard.

When enabled, Meraki Dashboard tracks the computer (MAC address) from which a given user logs in. If a user logs in from a different computer than the previous login, Dashboard will automatically de-authorize the previous computer. This prevents a single login account from being used by multiple computers at one time.

Note that Meraki’s billing solution has always performed this type of simultaneous login prevention, so this setting in Dashboard will not affect the behavior of your billing networks in any way.

This feature is available in Meraki Pro and Carrier Editions.

Our partners at Anaptyx have done additional environmental testing on the Meraki Outdoor. Preparing for a implementation in the frigid Boston area, they wanted to be certain that the Meraki Outdoor is up to the task in that environment. It proved to be quite a test: extreme cold, ice, heat, humidity and extensive exposure to water. Through it all, the Meraki Outdoor performed flawlessly. Check out this link to see the test results:

Meraki Outdoor testing by Anaptyx

- posted by Jeff Gould

We’ve been excited to see how your Meraki-powered networks have grown. And to help you more easily manage your large networks, we’ve recently enhanced the usage monitoring page. With these improvements, you’ll be able to quickly and easily analyze usage on even the largest, 1000+ node networks.

Specifically, the new usage page allows you to:

• Filter your results by connection status, type, and bytes transferred
• Break the results into multiple pages for faster load times in large networks
• Customize the columns that the page presents
• Search for specific client devices by name, IP address, last AP used, and more

Best of all, these improvements are available right now. Like all of our Dashboard updates, there’s nothing to download, and nothing to install. Just log in to Dashboard, and you’re good to go.

As always, let us know what you think by using the “make a wish” feature on Dashboard, or dropping us a line at feedback@meraki.com. And many thanks to those of you who sent feedback during the beta-testing of the new page.

- posted by mukesh agrawal

Many of our customers use splash pages and, as usage has grown, so has the variety of ways people are using them.  One of the requests we hear most frequently is for greater ability to customize and control the user experience.

We’ve listened, and are proud to announce the new Custom Splash feature.  As a Meraki network operator you can now select from a broader variety of templates or create your own layout, color scheme, and graphics.

Download this video: High resolution MP4 | iPhone

There are a number of ways to use the custom splash page feature:
• Complete branding   Make the user experience your own by using your company’s colors, style, and even corporate style sheet.
• Integrate into an existing network   You can combine custom splash with Meraki RADIUS and walled garden to seamlessly integrate Meraki into an existing network system.
• Advertising   You can use custom splash to insert your own advertising.

Meraki hosts the pages and images for you.  You can either upload your HTML or edit the code online using our built-in editor.  You can also upload your own cascading stylesheets (CSS).

Custom Splash Pages are available in Meraki Pro and Carrier Edition.

- Posted by Brian Tobin

We recently increased the number of pricing plans a Meraki network could have from 2 to 5.  This allows you to set up to 3 more pricing plans with a variety of time ranges (Hour/Day/Week/Month), bandwidth limits, and prices besides your network’s first 2 pricing plans. 

Among our most requested features, we’re excited it’s now available for your use.

Along with this change, we also enabled an adult content filtering setting.  This allows you as a network administrator to block requests for material deemed “adult” by the OpenDNS service.  This feature can be found on the advanced configuration page.  Enjoy!

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

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom helped us announce some great news today about our free city wide wireless network, Free the Net.  At a press conference held in the Tenderloin district of the city, we shared an exciting plan to help the city provide high speed wireless access to the tens of thousands of residents currently living in Affordable Housing complexes across the city.  It’s an ideal partnership – Meraki provides dependable high speed wireless Internet access and the City of San Francisco coordinates the efforts of non-profit resources to help establish technology training programs and computer centers in each building. The project will kick off on September 22nd as Meraki helps San Francisco celebrate One Web Day by completing wireless network installations at 12 single and family occupancy buildings throughout the Tenderloin.

Free the Net already has a presence in 80% of the city’s major neighborhoods and is well on its way towards covering the city in free wireless access.  The network has seen tremendous growth in the little of a year since we began distributing free Meraki Indoor and Outdoor devices to San Francisco residents, with over 37 terabytes of data downloaded on the network to date.

We’re always looking for innovative means of testing the scope of our products and Free the Net has offered us no shortage of opportunities to improve and expand the solutions we offer our customers around the world.  It’s an exciting time at Meraki and we look forward to sharing more good news with you in the coming months!

Read the press release
Go to onewebday.org

- Posted by Lois Schonberger

CTIA’s 2008 conference kicked off this week here in San Francisco with over 15,000 in attendance.  The annual mobile technology bonanza highlights some of the industry’s latest innovations and is sure to focus on the swiftly growing relationship between handheld devices and wireless broadband access.

We’ve been interested in the growth of wi-fi enable handhelds for some time.  In the course of building Free the Net, our own large scale free wireless network in San Francisco, we came across some compelling metrics.  Since its birth about a year ago, nearly 150,000 wireless devices have used the network.  The percentage of those devices made up by iPhones has grown from 6% to 20% in just the past five months.

We’re trying out some ways to integrate these new users into our solutions, creating a customized iPhone splash page for Free the Net.  Below are some images of the iPhone splash pages we are testing.  As with all of the solutions we try out – expect to see the ability to customize the welcome page of your Meraki Network to mobile users in the coming months!

- Posted by Lois Schonberger

As some of you have noticed, we’ve been working on a new version of the device list page in Dashboard. Our goal with the new device list is to make it easier for you to get the information you need about the devices in your network. Here are some of the most prominent features of the new device list:

- Icons that make it easy to see, at-a-glance, whether a device is a Meraki Mini, Meraki Indoor, or Meraki Outdoor, whether it is online or offline, and whether it’s functioning as a gateway or repeater

- The ability to filter the list by hardware type, device status, role, and usage (bytes transferred)

- A search box to find devices by name or MAC address

- Richer data in the device details view, including current and historical routing information

We’ve found these features valuable in managing our own network (Free the Net), and we hope they’ll be useful for you as well. Give it a try, and let us know how it works for you by using the “I wish this page would…” link at the bottom of the page.

Many thanks to our early-beta testers, who provided invaluable feedback to improve the new device list. Also, we’re still working out some issues with Internet Explorer 6, so you may want to try the beta device list in a more recent browser like Internet Explorer 7 or Firefox.

- Posted by Mukesh Agrawal

All Meraki Pro administrators now have additional configuration options for free access in tiered access networks. Previously the only option available was to enable or disable 20 minutes of free access for un-paid or un-registered users. Now you can set the free access period to be any length of time, or a full day.

To configure free access time and bandwidth limits, log in to your Meraki Dashboard and click on the configure tab.

- Posted by Cooper Marcus

We’re excited to announce two improvements to the Meraki Billing system: PayPal Payout and Additional Currencies. These features are currently in beta testing, and we’d like to invite you to try them and let us know what you think.

PayPal Payout

Meraki Billing now supports electronic payout via PayPal. You can enable PayPal payout by logging into Dashboard and going to Configure -> Billing Payout. We hope this will make it even easier for you to receive your payments.

Note that PayPal is available for the payment from Meraki to you, not for charging end users.

Additional Currencies

We are also testing support for additional billing currencies. This means you can now charge your end users for network access in one of several supported currencies and receive payment in that same currency via PayPal. We currently support the Euro, British Pound, and Canadian Dollar.

You can select your currency in Configure -> Basic. If you’ve ever had a billing transactions in your network, you’ll need to create a new network to switch currencies. See the international currency transition knowledge base article for details.

- Posted by Hans Robertson

Meraki is pleased to announce that case based support, previously available only to Pro and Carrier Edition customers, is now available to all Meraki customers. To access case based support, log in to your Meraki Dashboard and click on the support tab.

Prior to submitting a case, we strongly encourage you to research your issue in our ever-expanding Knowledge Base. There you’ll find over 200 helpful answers to the vast majority of questions posed by our customers.

We made this improvement because of the feedback we received about support resources available to Standard and Legacy Edition customers. If you have additional feedback, please share it with us via email - we don’t have time to respond to all the messages we receive, but we do read every one.

- Posted by Cooper Marcus