I’ve narrowed things down:

Problem only occurs when I’m running my Linux OS (Ubuntu 8.10). When I reboot into Windows XP, I can browse the web w/o intrustion from Freethenet. I use Linux everywhere else at public wifi, w/o any problem whatsoever (of course, they are places where Freethenet does not reach). Even at Church Street Cafe, I was connecting just fine in Linux…until Freethenet began showing up.

I’m guessing that Freethenet is limiting its wifi to Windows-only (for whatever reason). If Freethenet does not clear up this problem, I’ll be forced to eliminate those public wifi’s within its range…which may some day soon, include the entire bay area!

PS: Church Street Cafe uses Comcast service, if this matters.

Don’t get me wrong, I totally support Freethenet’s goals. But I’ve discovered your service wrest’s my wifi connection from where I’m hanging out (Church Street Coffeehouse, SF). The wifi I connect with is very robust (Church St Cafe), then all of a sudden a window pops up, tells me I’m now connected to Freethenet.

All well and good, but your signal is so weak, it’s useless. I have to manually reconnect to “Church St Cafe”…until the next time Freethenet interferes. So I set up my wifi to not automatically connect to Freethenet. However, my connection is drastically slowed down anyway…and I mean SLOW…like, 4-20 kbps!

As long as Freethenet is in my air space, my connection is slowed down drastically, even though my wifi settings claim I’m still connected via Church St Cafe.

Whatever you’re doing, you’re not making any friends. Please find a way to stop this sabotage of people’s connections! It’s very irritating, and bad for business for the owner of that coffeehouse!

If you are using a Meraki word of advice, remove the standard antenna it ships with and get a better one. You’ll get a far better range and be able to freethenet to a far greater audience than ith the standard antenna.

(A) Network Interface Card (NIC) : For internet speed up to 144 Kbps.

(B) EVDO Card : Internet speed up to 2.4 Mbps*

Also, do the folks in these new places even have computers?

Talkimng about Meraki (and I had ready fro GigaOM first about Meraki) and just 2 days later when I visited Bar Harbor, Maine, at the hotel we were staying which had free wifi, I conncted to it and lo and hehold – it was advertised – powered by Meraki.

So I see that Meraki is not ony limited to west coast but also seems to be in the east coast too.

But sadly, the wifi signal in our rooms was too weak for any fruitful purpose. Dont knwo how the Meraki devices are supposed to act as repeaters but in this case it as a farily weak implementation and not really effective apart from the main hotel lobby.

But nice to see its spread in usage though.

Stateside, maybe they’ll get Google to sponsor free WiFi in other cities with their system. The stats on their signup page at http://sf.meraki.com/overview says they are near 100,000 users now, which is enough to turn some heads.