Several factors greatly influence the quality of service (QoS) in multihop wireless mesh networks (WMNs). These include the transmission range, number of gateways, number of nodes served by each gateway, gateway location, relay load and access fairness. While finding an optimal solution to simultaneously satisfy the above constraints is known to be NP-hard, near optimal solutions can be found within the feasibility region in polynomial time using heuristic algorithms. In this paper, first we present a near optimal heuristics algorithm for gateway placement, and later we compare its performance with some previously known sub-optimal solutions.