FON WiFi For Everyone
A new product called FON is making its debut and hoping to unify all of our extra bandwidth into one giant network. I think it’s a great idea to share all of the idle bandwidth we have kicking around. Unfortunately, I don’t think that the internet providers are going to feel the same way. There may also be some issues of liability — what if someone hacks a bank on my wifi connection?
FON has two modes, the “Bill” mode and the “Linus” mode. Bill Gates’ model: make money with your WiFi broadband connection by charging non-FON members that use it. Opensoucer model, share your WiFi broadband connection in exchange for using the WiFi of all the other FON members. Sounds like a good model to me!
The only requirement that I found is that you’re using a Linksys WRT54G. FON sells them pre-loaded with the software you need or you can download it and install the software yourself.
Posted: November 14th, 2005 under technology.
Comments: 5
Comments
Comment from rroca
Time: November 16, 2005, 2:23 pm
Not sure if you can read spanish, however you might be interested in to read this post from Ricardo Galli. There is many of them also running in other blogs currently in Spain.
Just to clarify a few key points:
Martin is not introducing new concepts at all.
By today FON have not released any software. Is providing just a copy of the standard OpenWRT firmware (open source, available to everybody) with no any additional feature at all. But that locks any router to FON.
“Bills” model is not available. Is even far from being released. Simply does not exists.
Many people is just starting to realize that this story is just about a double-deal.
Kind regards.
Comment from Eric
Time: November 17, 2005, 4:37 pm
Alas, I cannot read Spanish well enough to understand your post. I took it for a few years and even spent a summer in Mexico… but have forgotten most of my Spanish in place of German.
Humm, I’m going to look into FON a bit more before recommending it if that is the case. I noticed that if you search for “fon wifi” on Google that I’m the third result, wow!
Comment from rroca
Time: November 18, 2005, 12:26 pm
Certainly is too early to get a full picture about it since in fact there is nothing released. Just an OpenWRT with chillispot and with no real nodes at all. To us looks quite strange to try oversell amd make noise on this this giving the fact of what’s behind and that there is already presence of free networks in Spain developing the bottom line concepts but trying to ignore them…
Just let me know if you wish more details about our discussions or help in some translations.
If wou are interested in up, running, deployed and growing social wifi mesh networks you might want take a look at our network.
Have a nice weekend!
Ramon.
Comment from Dan Flett
Time: November 26, 2005, 4:46 pm
FON may not be a new concept, and it may be vapourware to a certain degree at this point, but I think Martin is doing an excellent job of popularising the concept of Internet sharing. Martin may or may not turn FON into a successful enterprise, but even if he doesn’t, the concept will remain in peoples minds thanks to him.
Comment from Jaakko Kuosmanen
Time: December 10, 2005, 11:26 am
Hi There is a similar Wi-Fi community started in Finland, it is called SparkNet and it has some 1.000 hot spots connected already. See https://open.sparknet.fi and www.sparknet.fi
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