Meraki is coming. Well almost. Founded by Ph.D. candidates from MIT (Sanjit Biswas and others), Meraki Networks is hoping to provide consumer wireless mesh Internet network designed to "unwire the world" and bring Internet access to the next billion. Meraki recently closed a $5 million funding with Sequoia Capital. Google is also financing them. Read their ExOR paper to get an idea of the underlying technologies behind Meraki products. This paper got the best paper award at SIGCOMM 2005.

Hari Balakrishnan and Robert Morris are on the technical advisory board of Meraki, and what I personally found amusing was this line in Robert Morris's bio in Meraki's team profile:

"In 1988 his discovery of buffer overflow first brought the Internet to the attention of the general public."

For those who don't know that line actually refers to the Morris Worm. Quite an interesting way to refer to the Morris Worm! Meraki wants to enable Internet access for the next billion by solving the "last mile" problem. Their products can make a lot of sense in the urban population of the developing countries where last mile is the main problem.