Meraki, a spin-off company formed in 2006 to develop and commercialise the MIT Roofnet technology (an implementation of commodity hardware and open source software, built on Linux, which provides wifi coverage for MIT's campus), and provided cheap technology ($50/unit).
A member of the Vancouver Community Network writes that they initially looked at Meraki technology, but the pricing model put them off - $5/node/month for access to the "dashboard" - the real-time monitoring software that they were developing for managing the networks.
However, the pricing model was later changed to allow you to run a free network, or a subscription model.
As a result, many people started building networks based on Meraki technology.

In February Meraki announced a change to their EULA (End User Licence Agreement) which precluded anyone from changing any of the software that they install on their units. This meant that from that point forward, people would be breaking their rules, and maybe the law, by installing their own work on their hardware. Of course this could not be applied retroactively so people were free to continue to work with the hardware that they had already bought.

Last week, a user tried installing his own firmware on one of the nodes that he manage and failed 5 times in a row before he gave up.
He then learnt that the failure is due to the fact that Meraki has automatically updated the software on all of the units (including legacy, such as ours) so that you cannot install a different firmware on it, at all.

So... in the course of six months Meraki has gone from "happy hacking - buy our equipment and use it to help poor people access the net" to "pay three times as much for our hardware and we'll install whatever we want on it, whenever we want, and you can't look under the hood to see what it's doing or install your own software on it."

Full article available here.

After one ISP reportedly claimed WiMax was a "disaster" that didn't perform, its network equipment supplier Airspan has hit back, defending the technology and labelling the ISP cheap.

Speaking at a WiMax conference in Bangkok last week Garth Freeman, CEO of Buzz Broadband, disparaged the technology, according to a report in Communications Day. Freeman said that WiMax's range was limited to two kilometres and it was unable to support VoIP, the report said.

Full article is here.

Many US cities, intending to blanket the cities with wifi, are now having second thoughts, after one of the major ISPs, EarthLink, pulled out, saying "the operations of the municipal Wi-Fi assets were no longer consistent with the company’s strategic direction."

Full article available here, and slashdot.org discussion here.

Australia’s first WiMAX operator, Hervey Bay’s Buzz Broadband, has closed its network, with the CEO labeling the technology as a “disaster” that “failed miserably.”

In an astonishing tirade to an international WiMAX conference audience in Bangkok yesterday afternoon, CEO Garth Freeman slammed the technology, saying its non-line of sight performance was “non-existent” beyond just 2 kilometres from the base station, indoor performance decayed at just 400m and that latency rates reached as high as 1000 milliseconds. Poor latency and jitter made it unacceptable for many Internet applications and specifically VoIP, which Buzz has employed as the main selling point to induce people to shed their use of incumbent services.

Full article here, and slashdot.org discussion here.

Dan from DansData.com rants on about "impossible" antennas.

See here for the full rant.