At the first community meeting for San Francisco WiFi1 earlier this week, Google fielded questions from vocal community advocates2, but also showed off what kind of hardware users would likely need to access the planned free network. One of those devices was a WiFi router based on an open platform called the Meraki Mini, made by Mountain View-based startup Meraki3, which we wrote about last August4.
When we talked to Google’s Chris Sacca after the community meeting he said that Google funded Meraki a few months ago with an “open source development grant” to help the company keep parts of its technology open source, and to work with Google’s muni WiFi deployments.
http://asides.gigaom.com/2006/10/05/google-meraki/