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

We recently launched a number of features in our Carrier Edition that make it easier to setup and administer larger Meraki networks. Here are some of the notable new features.

RADIUS (Beta)
Our RADIUS service has been in beta for a couple of months now, and feedback has been great. We’re adding high availability and failover features.

Custom Splash Pages
A number of people have asked for the ability to create fully custom splash pages using their own HTML. We’ve got that in the product today.

Walled Garden
Operators who are using RADIUS and their own sign up processes can now designate an IP range that unauthorized users can reach. You might use this to create a user sign-up process on your own website, or give free access to certain areas while limiting access to the broader Internet.

Lawful Intercept (Beta)
A number of jurisdictions require network operators to be able to comply with intercept requests. In the past , this was challenging because of Meraki’s use of NAT. We’ve built a special interface that allows operators to isolate the traffic of a client onto a single port range, enabling integration with existing lawful intercept systems.

Example Usage: An Integrated Network
Larger network operators can combine these features to integrate Meraki into existing network management systems. For example, you might create a splash page encouraging people to sign up for your service. Then, create a walled garden around your own signup and billing systems. Finally, you can attach your own user management system to Meraki using RADIUS.

- Posted by Hans Robertson

Meraki’s goal has always been to change the economics of Internet access. By enabling companies and organizations to build large-scale networks quickly and cheaply, we figured we could get more people online, more often, and in more places. The response over the past year has been amazing: our customers have built thousands of networks covering villages in Chile and apartment complexes in California. We’ve also gotten a lot of excellent feedback. People email, call us, and drop by the office every day. In response, we’ve been busy building new features. We’re going to use this blog to keep everyone abreast of our latest product developments.

And now for the good stuff! There’s been a lot of product activity over the last couple of months that we’d like to share. Below are some of the most significant improvements. Email us and let us know what you think.

User List
A number of people told us that they need to understand what a given user is doing, not just a given device. So we added a user list, where you can see a user’s activity across all of her devices. This works whether your network uses Meraki’s billing, native user auth, RADIUS, or our prepaid card system. To use it, just login to Dashboard and go to Monitor-Users.

Enhanced Failover
Internet connections sometimes go down. Previously, this caused problems because repeaters would continue to send traffic to the failed gateway, even if another gateway was available. The mesh is now smart enough to recognize when a gateway’s internet connection has failed, and automatically recovers once the connection comes back up.

Network Isolation
Multiple Meraki networks in the same area no longer route traffic between each other. This is an important security enhancement that will become more important as the number of Meraki networks continues to grow.

Routing over Ethernet
Some people have wondered what the second Ethernet port on the Meraki outdoor might be used for. The second port, combined with routing over Ethernet, lets you combine two Meraki radios together. Here’s one way this could work. Let’s say you have a portion of your mesh that is far away from its gateway. Put a directional antenna on one Meraki Outdoor to get a strong signal to your gateway. Then, attach a second Meraki Outdoor using a regular Ethernet cable. Finally, put an omni-directional antenna on the second outdoor so you can build out the mesh.

Run Dark
Sometimes you just don’t want to draw attention to your Meraki repeater, especially at night. You can now turn off the LEDs on your Meraki network.

- Posted by Hans Robertson