Before discussing in detail about Meraki and Meshcom, lets discuss about Open-Mesh. Its truly poor man’s wifi mesh networking product. As written on their site, the product is ideal for school/office campuses, hotels, apartments and towns. My first Open-Mesh network is successfully running in Chennai serving more than 10 users in an apartment complex.

The product comes with hardware routers and a hosted online interface to manage it. Routers cost 49$ a piece and if you buy 20 pieces together you will get it for 799$. The routers are very small with the size of a toilet soap.

The hosted dashboard is very simple to use and any one can create and deploy a network without anyone’s help. To add a node to a network, all that is required to do is to punch in its MAC id into the hosted admin interface. The system will find the router, next time its powered.

One major feature of open-mesh is that, it supports multiple internet gateways. When you have a mesh containing 20+ routers, you will definitely need to have multiple gateways on your network. This is to act as a fail safe arrangement and also for bandwidth distribution.

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