Venture Beat’s Anthony Ha says the San Francisco free WiFi network, using Meraki access points, is quietly moving forward with its plans to blanket the entire city in free WiFi.

In fact, the company just crossed a big threshold — Meraki says more than 100,000 people have used its Free the Net service. That number is more than double the 40,000 users that Google and Sequoia backed Meraki was reporting at the beginning of the year.

Residents is some areas of the city can ask Meraki for free repeaters to spread that network even further. (See the map of Meraki coverage below.) Meraki even provides free wireless to some of the city’s affordable housing developments, and plans to expand in that area, too.

Unlike Earthlink, Meraki isn’t seeking the city government’s financial support or approval. The company runs local ads as part of its Free the Net service, but only as an experiment. Meraki says it isn’t making any money from those ads.

Sadly, it’s hard to imagine that every city can get free WiFi as a loss-leader for projects elsewhere. But Biswas says Meraki is seeing healthy growth for its pay product too, particularly in emerging markets like Latin America and Africa. As an example, he says Meraki created a wireless network for a village in Chile in just five days.

Mike Boyd’s Meraki network in Portland, Oregon, was built in just two hours. It is providing free WiFi for 100,000 people at the Waterfront Blues Festival, over the July 4th weekend.

Mike used a Motorola WiMAX client for the backhaul, with three outdoor Meraki repeaters. One Meraki repeater was placed on the very top of the Credit Union stage (above). Another repeater was placed at the booth of First Tech Credit Union, a festival sponsor.

KINK.fm, one of the event sponsors, allowed Mike to put his little Meraki/WiMAX basestation on the roof of their guest trailer. For the most part, everything self-configured. Plug and play.

The Motorola CPEi 150 modem discovered the nearest WiMAX backhaul automatically, then the three Meraki repeaters synched automatically to each other. It was built in cooperation with Portland’s Personal Telco Project, a 501(c) 3 non-profit that supplies ad-free hotspot service to homes and businesses, with more than 100 active hotspots, shared by individuals and small businesses.

By 11am today (July 4th), Mike Boyd reports 78 users have downloaded 524 mb already — an hour before the music begins.

---

Sam Churchill and Don Park run the DailyWireless.org website which summarizes the news from Community Lan and other industry related sectors with detailed updates from around the world. It is full of sausy talk, viscious rumors and tantilizing tidbits.

---