Starting in 2003, I led the RoofNet project with Sanjit Biswas, Dan Aguayo and Prof. Robert Morris at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) in Cambridge, MA.  We spent a huge amount of our time in the lab building prototypes, deploying networks ourselves, and working on technology to make wireless more reliable, accessible, and simpler. This work and technology served as the catalyst for Meraki’s formation, and 7 years later we’re proud to have the technology and product deployed across tens of thousands of networks and be the backbone of a company with incredible momentum.

Because CSAIL is the birthplace of Meraki and MIT is the alma mater of myself and Meraki’s two other co-founders, we have always felt a special connection to the university.

The future of networking is in wireless – it’s a requirement in the workplace and something everyone needs to be effective. Given this fact, and our strong ties to the MIT community, you can imagine our excitement in sharing that today, MIT’s CSAIL is now officially a customer of Meraki.  CSAIL made the decision to switch from its primary networking vendor, a well-known provider, because of a growing number of complaints about reliability, performance and manageability. MIT will deploy 80 Meraki MR14 access points to improve reliability and performance throughout the building for more than 800 faculty, staff, and students.

We are incredibly pleased to have partnered with MIT and CSAIL on this project, and look forward to supporting their initiatives with Meraki.

- Posted by John Bicket

Today we are very excited to announce the release of a new free tool for the IT community: the Meraki WiFi Stumbler, the first browser-based wireless scanner.  WiFi Stumbler provides detailed, real-time and continuously updated information about nearby wireless networks (even those with hidden SSIDs), including the type of access point, MAC address, wireless channel, signal strength, encryption type and more.  It also features built-in search, sorting and filtering capabilities to make it easy to quickly find the data that you need when in the field troubleshooting networks.

So what is cool about the fact that it runs in a browser?  This means that there is no need to download and install software, making it a very convenient tool that can you can quickly have up and running whenever you need it.  WiFi Stumbler will run in most browsers on either a PC or a Mac, and it can even be used when you are not connected to the Internet if your browser supports HTML5 offline mode (currently only Firefox 3.5, but Safari and Chrome support should follow soon as well).

You can use WiFi Stumbler to optimize coverage and performance of existing networks, troubleshoot wireless performance issues, find rogue APs and perform basic site surveys when planning deployments.

The Stumbler web page has the same clean, intuitive feel as the Meraki Dashboard that our customers have come to expect from our products.  Here is a screenshot:

We will be adding new features and functionality to Stumbler on an ongoing basis – these features will be available to all users as soon as they are released.  And since the tool is browser-based, there is no need to download and install the latest version of software, or add patches or software updates to get these features.  Just reload the tool in your browser and the updates will “magically” appear.

Check out http://meraki.com/tools/stumbler for more details and to try it out.  WiFi Stumbler is still in beta release, so if you find any bugs or have any suggestions for new features please let us know using the Wish box in the tool.

We hope you find this to be a useful addition to your toolkit!

-Posted by Greg Williams

We’re happy to share that we’ve launched the Meraki Network Simulator: a free demo version of the Meraki Enterprise Cloud Controller that allows you to try out all of our web-based tools without purchasing or setting up physical access points.  For a long time, we’ve wanted to enable potential customers to test out the Meraki Dashboard without physical hardware.  The Meraki Cloud Controller is the most unique piece of our wireless LAN offering, providing simple centralized management to network administrators any time and any place over the web.  You really have to experience it personally to understand why it’s such a revolutionary way to manage your network.

The Meraki Network Simulator contains several sample networks that allow you to see how Meraki could work for you.  We’ve even populated the Cloud Controller with real-life data that we’ve captured and anonymized, so you can get a realistic picture of how the Meraki Dashboard looks on a live network.  Here’s a taste of what you can do with the simulator:

• Test-drive the Meraki Enterprise Cloud Controller for free, without purchasing hardware
• Experience the complete Cloud Controller configuration UI

• Test-drive Meraki’s network monitoring features

• Try out sample networks for office, university, and conference use cases

• Create your own blank network simulation and set it up from scratch, configuring simulated access points

Try it out and let us know what you think!

- Marie Williams

When you’re investigating mesh wireless issues, it’s important to know which mesh neighbors are seen by each access point (AP).  Here is a quick tutorial of how to best utilize the built-in features in Dashboard that allow you to check out who is talking to whom in the mesh and what the quality of the links are:

1. In the Dashboard, go to Monitor -> Access points.
2. Click an AP in the list.

3. Scroll down to the section Neighbors. (See screen shot below).

The Neighbors section reveals the mesh APs seen by the AP you’re currently looking at. Using the example above, the AP is directly communicating with four mesh neighbors: Outdoor, Indoor, MR14, and MR58. The other columns in the table provide useful information for troubleshooting wireless problems:

Dist (m)
Shows the distance from the AP to each neighbor in meters (Make sure to place the APs on the map accurately in order for these distances to be meaningful).

Radio
Describes which radio (if neighbor is a multi-radio device) of the neighbor is communicating with the AP.

Signal (dB)
Measures the received signal strength indication (RSSI) of the RF signal from the neighbor. This measurement correlates to a value in decibels (dB). For example, an RSSI of 10 is considered a very weak signal. To improve the signal: move APs closer to each other; create a better line-of-sight; consider using a more powerful antenna; eliminate RF interference; or try a different RF channel.

Fwd
Reports the percentage of packets successfully delivered from the AP to its neighbor. For example, 75% means that 3 out of every 4 packets made it to the neighbor from the AP; in other words, there’s 25% loss.  Good quality links typically will show no more than 10-15% packet loss.

Rev
Reports the percentage of packets successfully delivered from the neighbor to the AP. Good quality links will typically have no more than 10-15% packet loss.
If you don’t see a particular mesh AP in the list, that means the AP you’re looking at can’t see it. If it could, that mesh AP would be present in the Neighbors list.

Can you think of other information you’d like to see reported in the Dashboard? Let us know by entering your feedback in the “make a wish” field.

-Posted by Ahmed Akhtar

Our engineers are pretty busy and pretty humble, so a lot of what they do flies below the radar.
I’ve worked closely with rockstar engineers from Google, Apple, and the like, but the way our folks
operate blows my mind.

As those of you who use our product know, we have a “Make a Wish” widget at the bottom of every page in our app.
This lets users provide product feedback quickly and easily, which goes straight to our engineering and PM teams.

Below is a recent message received through Make a Wish, and the response from engineering. Take a close look at the timestamps.

A lot of the improvements our engineers make to the product happen without press releases, parties, and fanfare, so I wanted to shed some light on the kind of improvements that happen every day. Exchanges like this also reveal how helpful our customers are. The product wouldn’t be what it is without their feedback.

Lastly, it would be impossible to move this quickly while maintaining the reliability that our enterprise customers
expect without the big investment that our engineers have made in robust automated testing systems. This takes a lot of time and dicipline. While this work goes unseen outside of Meraki, the constant stream of new features and improvements, year after year, would be impossible without it.

Hats off!

Last week we upgraded all Standard networks to Pro at no charge. We thought we could provide the best service to our Standard customers by consolidating Standard and Pro to offer the same feature set.

This upgrade means Standard network operators will have the exact same features as Pro, including billing features, captive portal control, and our recently expanded Pro features such as splash pages and encryption on both SSIDs.

We hope everyone enjoys the new features!

I’m happy to announce that PC Magazine has presented us with the coveted Editor’s Choice award for our enterprise wireless LAN solution!  Arriving on the heels of a 4-out-of-5-stars review, which you can read here, the Editor’s Choice award is bestowed upon only the top 17% of products reviewed by PC Magazine.

We are humbled by the glowing review and award.   By receiving them, we further dedicate ourselves to our mission to provide an affordable yet feature-rich wireless LAN solution that is easy to deploy and manage.  It is this benefit that delights our customers and that is clearly resonating in the market.

- Posted by Jed Lau

We’ve got two big announcements today for our enterprise customers – significant new product features, and a lifetime warranty on all indoor enterprise access points!

Lifetime Warranty on Indoor Enterprise APs

We put a lot of care into building solid, high-quality products. We think our APs should last a lifetime, and now we’re putting our money where our mouth is.

Effective immediately, all of our enterprise-class indoor access points – including our most popular model, the MR14 – are covered by a lifetime warranty. This upgraded coverage applies retroactively to existing units as well as to new purchases, and is free of charge.

We’re also offering free advanced shipping – a first in our industry. This means that if your access points need replacement, we’ll ship out new units immediately, rather than waiting to receive your APs before sending out replacements.

Since we’ve seen very few failures, these new policies won’t affect the vast majority of you.  But we hope that these policies will make infrastructure budget planning easier for some, and add peace of mind for all.

New Enterprise Features

We’ve been working hard on new features for our enterprise products and we’re excited to announce that they’re available for you to use on your networks today.

Network Analytics

We now automatically generate periodic analytics reports of the activity on your wireless network. These reports show the usage and reliability of the wireless network, bandwidth trends, device popularity, mobility, and more. These are great for network operators, as well as their staff and management. We’ve even had beta users post parts of the reports to their blogs. Wondering which operating systems are most popular on the Stanford Computer Science department’s wireless network? See here. (Hint – Apple is taking over the world.)

Check out a complete sample, from Stanford’s Computer Science Department:

Rogue AP Detection

This feature protects against 2 kinds of security risks.  In one, a hacker can place an access point near your network that broadcasts the same SSID as your legitimate device.  If users inadvertently connect to it, they could enter sensitive information (like their network login) into the malicious device.  In the second case, one could plug a wireless access point into the wired LAN, without the appropriate encryption and access control – providing an opening into your network.  More often than not, this is done by an employee who does not know that he is putting the network at risk.

These two types of “rogue APs” can be detected with dedicated software tools – provided you physically walk around your coverage area with a laptop.  We’ve integrated rogue AP detection into our access points and monitoring software, so the Meraki network can continually monitor the airwaves for you and alert you upon signs of trouble.

Here at Meraki’s San Francisco office, our engineers plug in test devices left and right, giving a fertile testing ground for this feature:

Event Logging

We now expose fine-grained event logs in the Meraki Cloud Controller, giving precise visibility into where, when, and how devices are connecting to the network, and aiding in troubleshooting and device tracking.

Support for 16 SSIDs

We’ve upped the maximum number of SSIDs from 4 to 16.  While most customers have one SSID for their secure corporate network, and another open network for guests, some of our users have dedicated virtual networks for specialized equipment and devices, SSIDs with different bandwidth limits, etc.  Westmont College, one of our customers whom we’ve mentioned on the blog before,  has an SSID for their WiFi-controlled HVAC system, and Stanford’s Computer Science department has a dedicated SSID for their experimental robots!  Now that we support 16 SSIDs, you can have a dedicated SSID for your wireless toaster oven and not run out.

Availability (and the beauty of SaaS)

Since the Meraki Cloud Controller is a cloud-based software service, these features (and many other improvements) are available immediately – with no upgrades to purchase, and no software to download or install.

Within the next few days and weeks, we’ll dive deeper into some of these features here on the blog – exploring use cases, tips, and tricks.  In the mean time, give them a spin on your networks!

-Posted by Kiren Sekar

Meraki had a blast at last week’s IT Roadmap Expo, hosted by Network World.  For this expo we brightened up our booth with a dunk tank!  Our office in SF is terrorized by Nerf darts – we thought we’d bring a few out to the Expo for some fun, and show off the impeccable waterproofing of the Meraki Outdoor. Attendees who shot the (lit up) Meraki Outdoor into the water tank were entered into a raffle for a pair of iPod Touches. Congrats to winners Anthony and Yuan – enjoy the iPods (or one less item on your holiday shopping list).

Aside from the entertainment and errant splashes, we were excited to show off our products to the attendees.  As always, it was energizing to see their faces light up as we demoed the Cloud Controller dashboard.  We were also happy to see several of our customers drop by and say hi.

We’ll be out on the road again soon, and hope to see some of you – keep checking back for updates!  In the meantime, here’s a short recap of the event:

- Posted by Amy Zhou

We are pleased to announce that Techworld has awarded Meraki the 2009 Mobility/Wireless Product of the Year for the MR14 dual-radio 802.11n access point.  I had the opportunity to travel to London to receive our award, meet the judges and award recipients, and be interviewed by Techworld.

Techworld’s review of Meraki, which appears below from their website, speaks for itself.  The full list of award winners is available here.

Thanks to Techworld for the recognition!  We are humbled and honored to have been selected out of a field of such distinguished candidates.

-Posted by Jed Lau

If you’ve ever attended a big conference and had trouble connecting to the wireless or found it to be slow and unreliable, you are not alone.  Providing fast, reliable wireless for conferences where you have hundreds, even thousands of demanding users with multiple devices each Tweeting, downloading video and blogging can be very challenging.

Meraki, in conjunction with British Telecom, is currently providing wireless for the two-day LeWeb conference, which started today in Paris.  LeWeb is an annual tech conference that brings together tech luminaries, entrepreneurs, investors, technophiles and bloggers to discuss wide-ranging topics and to network.  There are over 2,000 attendees this year, all expecting reliable access to fast WiFi.  This photo (courtesy of Robert Scoble) perfectly illustrates why this event would put any wireless network to the test!  Check out all the iPhones and laptops (Interesting note: Over 23% of the clients on the network are Macs and 25% are iPhones, so almost half of all client devices are Apple products)!  As you can see every user has more than one wireless device….

So far tweets from the conference are raving about the speed and reliability of the wireless.  Here is a shot of the usage graph in Dashboard, showing peak usage of almost 100 Mbps!

Here is a shot of the network on the main event floor in Dashboard, showing how most of the 28 APs are deployed:

This is a great example of how scalable Meraki networks are, as well as how easy and fast they are to deploy and configure.  The entire network was deployed in about one workday!
Stay tuned for more updates from LeWeb….

-Posted by Greg Williams

Update, Kiren Sekar, December 15th 2009:

The conference has wrapped up but praise of the wireless keeps pouring in!  Tara Hunt’s blog listed highlights from the conference.  Number four made us downright delighted:

That Wifi was Flawless! Thanks goes out to the team at BT (especially Gary Shainberg who worked with Meraki to make the mesh impeccable), whose mesh network was so solid that there wasn’t a single blip the entire conference and we used only 10% of the bandwidth. As Loic points out: ” there was a 1gb line financed and paid for by LeWeb that’s why we never exceeded 10-20% of the bandwidth available”. Impressive! In fact, I could have gotten on Bit Torrent and gone crazy without causing any ruckus. Fabulous job!

Again, nice work by Gary at BT, and Rob and Mukesh from Meraki, for making this a success.

Frequently when using my Meraki Dashboard account, I find that I’m interested in more information than is displayed by default on the Dashboard. This may be true for Access Points, Clients, or Logons. The “Display options” link on these pages is a little button with big value to help me learn more about my network.

Here is the link on the Access Points page:

Click on the link to discover the fields that you can display:

Add those fields that are most helpful to you and hide the fields that you don’t need.  This way you can display the information that provides the most value to you while eliminating unnecessary clutter.

There are plenty of great ways to use this data to trouble shoot. For example, when there is a connectivity issue on a portion of a network, I add the Gateway field and sort the APs by gateway. Frequently I discover that the outage is associated with a single gateway… that tells me to look at the wired network and ISP service supporting that particular gateway. There are many other ways to sort these fields that can help you to better understand your network performance and behavior.

We hope this helps make your Dashboard experience even better.  We’ll periodically share our favorite Dashboard features with you to help you make the most of the troubleshooting tools at your disposal.

-Posted by Jeff

With so many different types of wireless devices out there today, you’re probably experiencing radio frequency (RF) interference in your wireless network whether you know it or not. RF interference is ubiquitous and there is no way to completely avoid it; the best you can do is identify sources of interference and take them into account when designing your network.  Meraki has introduced a new tool in Dashboard to determine whether interference is affecting your network adversely and to help you optimize your network for the local RF environment.

In the Meraki Dashboard, go to the access points list under the Monitor tab, and click on any active access point.  The channel utilization graph shows the percentage of time the access point has seen RF interference on its channel.  For example, if the access point is operating on channel 1 in the 2.4 GHz band, then the graph will show the amount of time channel 1 has seen interfering RF energy.

The percentage of utilization on the channel proportionally affects the peak performance that access points will be able to achieve.  Percentages higher than 30% can cause considerable connectivity issues. Here are some suggestions for reducing or coping with high levels of interference:

1.  Perform an RF site survey before deploying your network.  You can use the Real-Time Spectrum Analysis tool found on the Client Survey Tool tab of my.meraki.com with a battery-powered access point or a 3rd party spectrum analyzer to get an overview of the RF environment in your chosen place of deployment before installing your APs.
2.  Remove interfering devices from the area.  Common culprits are 2.4 GHz cordless phones, Bluetooth gadgets, microwaves and wireless video cameras.  A 3rd party packet sniffing tool can be very helpful to identify and locate interference sources.
3.  Ensure adequate wireless coverage to avoid weak spots; a weak signal from your access points is more easily degraded by local RF interference compared to a strong signal.
4.  Avoid using the same channel as neighboring wireless networks.
5.  Turn on channel spreading in Dashboard (go to the Configure tab and click on Network-wide settings) so access points can individually pick their own channel based on the RF interference they detect.
6.  If you are using Meraki 802.11n hardware, consider using the 5 GHz band to avoid the often congested 2.4 GHz band.

Using this new tool and following these simple tips will help you minimize RF interference effects in your Meraki network and optimize performance.

-Posted by Ahmed Akhtar

Last week Meraki participated in the 2009 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference in Denver, Colorado.  EDUCAUSE is a non-profit organization whose mission is to advance the intelligent use of technology in higher education.  This was the first time that Meraki has participated in an EDUCAUSE event, but it will certainly not be the last!  We have never seen such a concentration of tech-savvy, higher ed IT thought leaders (more than 4000 of them) in one place before, and it was exciting to be a part of it.  Each day was packed with seminars where schools could share best practices and their experiences with various IT initiatives with their colleagues, as well as keynote talks on the latest trends and issues in higher ed IT and technology plus workshops from over 250 vendors doing demos of some very cool products on the trade show floor.

Meraki hosted a booth on the floor as well as a special dinner event for CIOs and Directors of Technology for a small group of colleges and universities.  We had the opportunity to chat with folks from schools with as little as 100 students all the way up to big state schools with over 25,000 students, and to learn about their needs and pain points.  We saw tremendous interest at the booth in Dashboard demos of some of the networks of our current higher ed customers, such as Westmont College in Santa Barbara and Sweetbriar College in Virginia.  Both schools have recently done campus-wide 802.11n deployments with Meraki, and their respective techology gurus spoke at our EDUCAUSE event about their experiences.

Major takeaways from the event:

-With the degree of budget-cutting that higher ed has seen over the last 12 months, schools are more than ever looking for ways to increase their bang-for-buck on IT spending and for ways to make reduced staff more efficient and more productive.
- There is a tremendous amount of excitement surrounding new ways to leverage cloud computing to reduce capex and operating costs of IT departments while increasing reliability and manageability of systems.
- Meraki is a great fit for higher ed, organizations that even in the best of times make due with limited budgets and IT staff that need a fully-featured wireless LAN that won’t break the bank, can be managed by a small staff and can easily scale and be rolled out across entire campuses.

We are excited to help our new friends from EDUCAUSE find ways to save money while simultaneously improving the quality of services that they can provide their students, turning their wireless networks from a liability into a strategic asset for recruiting and student retention.

Look for Meraki at future EDUCAUSE events, especially in places where the weather is as gorgeous as it was in Denver last week!

Mort and Hans giving Dashboard demos and chatting with booth visitors

-Posted by Greg Williams

Deploying the industry’s first cloud-based enterprise wireless LAN provides our customers with many unique and powerful benefits that can make IT administrators’ jobs easier.  One particularly powerful and useful tool is the ability for Meraki support staff to help remotely troubleshoot and resolve any technical issues that arise when deploying and integrating Meraki wireless networks with existing wired networks.  Leveraging the secure tunnel that is created between end devices and the Meraki Cloud Controller, Meraki can upon request assist you with basic diagnostics like checking if your firewall needs some tweaking for proper communication with your Meraki Cloud Controller.   In addition to the basics, Meraki can also conduct an in depth traffic analysis to determine what type of communication is flowing through your wired uplink as well as your wireless client connections.  This monitoring is captured in .pcap form for simple integration with popular network analysis tools such as Wireshark.  Since all of this testing can be conducted at the Meraki HQ, it allows Meraki’s Support Organization and its partners to act as natural extensions of your own networking team.  So if you’re struggling with a wireless issue and are still perplexed after searching the knowledge base, reach out to Meraki Support via Dashboard, our website or phone and save valuable time by leveraging these additional tools at your disposal.

-Posted by Dan Pittelkow