* FON builds community of WLAN access points
A Spanish start-up has taken the excitement associated with wireless LANs and run with it. This week FON launched an effort to drum up support for its “Wi-Fi community” concept by selling routers for an attention-grabbing $5 each.
FON bills itself as “the largest Wi-Fi community in the world.” You download the company’s software to your wireless LAN-enabled router or buy one of these $5 routers with the firmware already installed. You connect the router to your Internet connection.
And then you open it up to the world.
This makes you a “FONero.” There are two types of FONeros, Linuses and Bills. Linuses share their Wi-Fi connections in exchange for free access to all other FON-enabled Wi-Fi hot spots. Bills share their Wi-Fi connections in exchange for half of the revenue collected by FON from non-FONeros who purchase daily passes to access their routers.
The marketing is clever, and the idea is intriguing.
Detractors say that visitors to your router could suck up your bandwidth. Some broadband providers may place restrictions on how much you can download in a given period of time, and opening your router to the FON masses may push you up against those limits. And then, who knows what kind of security concerns this could open up?
FON tries to allay these concerns by stating it is a “safe” Internet connection, and that all those accessing a Wi-Fi connection are registered users. In somewhat broken English, the site says, “Sharing your Wi-Fi with the FON Community is all the opposite to leave your Wi-Fi signal unprotected.”
