Grokking FON

I remember reading about FON when it got funding, but didn’t bother checking our more thoroughly then. Having done that now, I can say wow. FON is a “global community of people”, all of whom share their WiFi connection with rest of the community. So when I share my WiFi connection, I get to use the WiFi hot-spots shared by other “foneros” (i.e. FON users). The idea isn’t that original, but the brilliant thing is the way the thing is implemented. If you have a certain type of WiFi router, you update its firmware, and your hotspot is instantly a part of the community (updating the firmware may sound hard to do, but it took me only a minute or so; its dead simple).

Currently they only support the above scenario (the service is in beta, as any good web 2.0 thingy), but the whole concept seems to be planned so that outsiders (who are not part of the community) must pay for access (with rev-share to the hot-spot owner). This seems like a sensible thing to all cafes, restaurants, motels etc. who need to be providing WiFi access. For $25 you get a subsidied FON router, and I like the fact that they are giving away routers for almost nothing to participants atleast in some areas (seems like a reasonable way; the cost of installing for example 100 routers in some place isn’t that big and sure helps to get the critical mass).

Their goal is ambitious, their firmware currently only runs on a couple of WiFI router models and is a bit lacking, but FON looks quite promising and they seem to have a solid team in place to pull this thing off. It will be interesting to see how this works out.

Update (Jun. 15): Martin Varsavsky, CEO of FON was speaking yesterday at the Aula Movement event. He’s a funny guy and I hope Aula will provide a video of his talk online (as well as the other talks, all of which were excellent). FON also announced that they’ll give away 1000 FON routers for 5€ here in Finland. Rock on!