Meraki mucks up the mesh

Apparently Mesh Network provider Meraki has managed to piss off a lot of it's users by jacking up rates without warning. "Standard" consumer versions seem to be the same price - with ads injected to compensate - and "Pro" versions get a $100 price bump (that's a 200% increase from $50). So many people who were planning on using Meraki to roll out networks for buildings and needed the billing features of "Pro" are now stuck, especially if they are in the middle of a deployment.

This is a shame, especially for the bad publicity it seems to be generating. However overall I think for a commercially backed product it is still a good deal - those trying to use other hardware will probably find themselves looking at hundreds of dollars per node. But I wouldn't be surprised if it is long before some mesh features start appearing in the Open Source router software configurations - such as OpenWRT - which have long been innovating in adding advanced access point and router features to off the shelf hardware from makers like Linksys and Buffalo.