The company was based in part on the MIT Roofnet project, an experimental 802.11b/g mesh network developed by the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

They started putting gateway devices in the Lower Haight neighborhood to provide Internet access and giving away repeaters.

By October 2007, they estimated 20,000 distinct users connected and about 5 terabytes of data transferred in this network.

Since then, Meraki discontinued this public service, though many access points remain active, but with no connection to the Internet.

On August 9 customers were informed that recovery efforts were still underway but that they "do not expect to be able to recover most assets".