Convergint UK Joins Cisco Meraki in London for Learning and Networking

Cisco Meraki is a cloud-managed IT company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Their products include wireless, switching, security, enterprise mobility management (EMM) and security cameras, all centrally managed from the web. Meraki was acquired by Cisco Systems in December 2012. Meraki was founded by Sanjit Biswas, John Bicket and Hans Robertson. Meraki was funded by Google and Sequoia Capital. In 2006, the organisation started in Mountain View, California before relocating to San Francisco. Meraki employed people who worked on the MIT Roofnet project. In 2007, Meraki selected San Francisco for their community-based Free the Net campaign. They started putting gateway devices in the Lower Haight neighborhood to provide Internet access and giving away repeaters. In the first year of the project, the growth of the network was primarily in the Mission District. By October 2007, they estimated that 20,000 distinct users were connected and about 5 terabytes of data were transferred in this network. In July 2008, Meraki said 100,000 people in San Francisco used its “Free the Net” service. Since then, Meraki discontinued this public service, though many access points remain active, but with no connection to the Internet.