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Google and Skype in Startup to Link Hotspots
An anonymous reader writes "Google and Skype are investing in a new startup (FON, the Spanish startup) that plans to help hotspot owners charge for Wi-Fi access points. The plan outlines two different classes of customer; "Linus" members, named after Linus Torvalds, will share their hotspot with other Linus members for free and "Bill" members, named after Microsoft's Bill Gates, will charge for access to their hotspot. FON will get some of that revenue, and share it with ISPs."
Linus & Bill. I love it. Glad to know someone still has a sense of humour out there.
I know that here on slashdot and in the geek community in general, we wear our colors proudly. But does anyone else think that this naming convention is a tad juvenile?
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
The guys from FON were recently at ETel in San Francisco. There are also Aliens, which are the people who are willing to pay for access.
i en.php
Linuses: People who will let others (Aliens and other Linuses) use their links, if they in turn can use other Linuses links.
Bills: People who will let others (Aliens) use their links, for a percentage of the profits.
Aliens: People who are willing to pay Bills to use their links (and since they pay, they can use Linuses links), but aren't willing to share their own connections.
For more information about the different types of users, see http://en.fon.com/info/linus-meet-bill-meet-an-al
As of 10/06/03, I hate COBOL developers.
I just don't understand what they could offer that would make me switch.
They can't compete on price, nor anonymity.
it's a blue bright blue Saturday hey hey
Right now I can share my Wi-Fi spot with anyone I want. The only real software here is the "Bill" version which would allow charging. And guess what? I can do the "Linus" version with any wireless router I please.
And Balmer members will throw their wi-fi equipment at each other and threaten to fucking kill the linus members.
There will be a Larry model released later, but it's expected to remain in beta for the first 15 years, and unusuable for the first 15 weeks due to overwhelming underestimates of how many people would use something by Google.
Like the Linus model, it will be free to use. However it will log everything you do for non-evil purposes.
The launch of this service wouldn't be in seven weeks from now, would it?
;P
Like just after March 31st?!?
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I can only wonder what a "Steve" member is.
In Soviet Russia, backwards is everything.
So if I sign up for this, and somebody using my connections downloads all sorts of illegal files, who is the RIAA going to sue? The obvious choice seems the subscriber of the internet connection which would be me. FON's website says "Am I responsible if a user uses my connection for any illicit activity? No. As long as you have not actively participated in the commission of a crime or do not have knowledge that a particular individual is using your connection to commit a crime or illegal activity, it is our understanding that you are not responsible. Nevertheless, this may vary depending on the laws of each country. Furthermore, FON discourages any inappropriate use of your connection by making sure that each user of the FON Community has registered and is identifiable." Not very reassuring to me.
Will sit atop their houses and type their messages the old fashioned way.
Do you think it is free for the provider? No? Than what makes you special that you think someone else should pay for your convience?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
The "Steve" membership will cost twice as much as the "Bill" membership, but will require no configuration, have longer uptimes, and all of its interfaces will be so damn pretty.
Let me get this straight - Google, Ebay/Skype, Sequoia and Index are investing $22 million in a startup that
- aims to do something obvious("FON's idea is not entirely novel - in fact, several companies and associations have tried to tie together free Wi-Fi hotspots into networks, but no one has succeeded on a large scale.")
- doesn't yet have a plan on how to prevent the notoriously insular/suspicious ISP's from blocking this service("FON faces a hurdle in that most ISPs prohibit subscribers from sharing internet access with people outside their household")
- doesn't have the software for the "Bill"(read: paying) part of the idea for the next 4 months
- is going against the grain when it comes to wi-fi trends(wasn't Google itself planning to offer free wi-fi in SF?)
- is treading slippery legal ground here(consumers reselling their Internet connections to others)
But wait, Google is investing in it so I guess this really must be a great idea right?
This has all the potential to start a new revolution in P2P bandwidth sharing, just like Napster. In the end, the whole this is pretty good for easy/cheap internet access. But....
The whole thing rests with a private company.
Unlike Napster:
1. The entry barrier is huge. [We are not dealing with data alone]
2. It is difficult to switch to another service; unlike Kazaa to eDonkey to BitTorrent. The reach of the service is local, for Napster it was anyone anywhere with a Network Connection.
3. The guy who started this, is more of a shrewd businessman. He may not give a damn about all that "Freedom" that we really care about.
4. Lots of chicken and egg issues for a competitor to spring up [like ISP support]
By 2008, if this service has 5 million people hooked (like Napster); then where will we stand? To emphasize, unlike switching email providers, or P2P servers, the entry barrier will be monstrous; and only an investment from the likes of Microsoft or IBM will create a competitor.
I will never sign-up for this!
Life is just a conviction.
It looks like an attempt made by a company that wants to leech off some cash from various wireless APs, but wants to appease the /. community by giving it's product plans names like "Linus" and "Bill".
http://www.fon.com/
Charging for wi-fi access is just plain selfish unlesss that is all you offer as a business. For example: Starbucks makes so much money selling drinks and other crap, they could easily give it away. Don't even give me that crap that people would sit all day and surf. Some would, but they would be in the vast minority. Most people buy their swill, bs with someone for a few and head into the adjoining bookstore.
The obvious response to this would be to not go to Starbucks. If you don't like that a business will not give you free internet access, don't shop there. This seems pretty brain dead simple to me. Hell, here in Boston there is a Starbucks and an ESR. ESR offers a free and open wi-fi access. Guess which place I buy my coffee from?
If the manager of Starbucks feels that offering free wi-fi will hurt business, then why should he do it? If he thinks he can make extra by charging for wi-fi, why not? If you don't like it, go some where else.
April fools day apparently comes early this year...
Aside from the fact that when Sputnik.com tried this back in 2002, WRT54Gs were not around.. how is this business plan and implementation any different?
...Seriously.
...All of these services that we got used to with the plain old telephone system. Also, although services like 3G really have a terrible protocol stack, at least it provides the above. Let's also not forget Wi-Max and realise that these fools are living in the past.
The whole "Hotspot" thing is getting old. Really, how many people would use a system/service that:
1. Is not engineered to be accessable country-wide on a single bill and with possibilities of international roaming?
2. Is designed for SHORT distances from access points.
3. Cannot hand over between cells.
4. Is unreliable, no guaranteed uptime and no centralised management of links. (If a link goes down, who is responsible to fix it?)
5. Has no "standard" protocol etc. configuration EVEN FROM THE SAME VENDOR, which makes configuration and management difficult.
6. Is reputedly insecure, with WPA-2 just about impossible to set up for a layman, and WEP easily cracked?
The only good thing to come from Wi-Fi is community meshes.
I'd love the Linus model and will promote it everywhere. I'd like to be the customer of the Linus model, yet my business will be a Bill model :)
I wonder if anyone will release a Darl model too.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
The "Jobs" class of connections.
You open your laptop, attempt to sign onto the wireless network, and a man in a black turtleneck walks up to you, swipes your credit card and hands you a glass of Kool-Aid.
It takes 30 minutes for the first ping...but after that you can connect to anyone in the world for the next 12 hours. In fact, the connection is so good, you can leave your laptop and just move your life-spirit to the actual server you are connecting to, and savor the magnetic aura of the hard drives, whilst having full access to your iTunes library...even the songs that won't be written for another 20 years.
Beat that shit.
In this country (Malaysia), wifi is free at Starbucks. I don't really see anyone with a laptop who doesn't also have a drink-in-progress. People (myself included) order something every hour or so, and at those prices, that's surely keeping them in business.
After hours it's a different story. Many of the Starbucks near me have primarily outdoor seating, and when they shut at 1 or 2am, strange characters show up with decal-coated laptops and do mysterious things late into the night. If this really bothered the management, presumably they would turn off the access point or bring in the chairs at closing time.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
Haven't you heard? Deluxe is the new Premium. Gold has been downgraded to normal, and Platinum is the new Gold.
Now excuse me, I have to fill out my application for an Unobtainium MasterCard.
Corollary to Hanlon's razor: Any significantly advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
The MPAA is suing your ass for some movie you never heard of. They offer you to settle for $4000 or risk going to court and loosing thousands more. This is what happened to me. I talked to several lawyers and they all came to the same conclusion; "If it's only $4K you should take the settlement." It doesn't matter that I was innocent. The only thing that matters is the RIAA/MPAA has more money and time than me and they can bankrupt me, but not the other way around.
A dangerous precident is being set right now and I feel as if we as private citizens are helpless.
Skype is both closed source and more importantly uses closed VoIP protocols. It is the antithesis of the 'Linus'. If you don't think that matters, then you just don't get it.
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
Can someone come up with an OS type project for this so people can do a share and share alike type thing for their wi-fi?
Is there already such a thing?
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
The article didn't really tell too much about what's distinctive about FON, so I went to their website here:
http://en.fon.com/
And of course, their blog: http://blog.fon.com/en/
It still isn't too clear though on what the advantage is of having a "Linus" hotspot instead of just having it be open-access. My guess is that the main benefit is that hotspot users are authenticated with a "global" ID, which would help deter abuse, spamming, etc.
A tough part of any agreement like this is, just like the article states, to actually get people to work together and provide access. There is an interesting perspective on how it might need a radical group who do it for kicks in Cory Doctorow's novel "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" to get things moving.
Personally, I think a time will come when WiFi access is very common, and some kind of roaming agreement between providers will cause your access to be metered by your ISP wherever you are.
Trivia: Did you know that practically the entire Internet infrastructure in Haiti is wireless?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
write a blog, throw some adsense ads at it, who knows, might make a buck, and it costs you nothing to try. Throw up a FON access point, charge aliens for service, who knows, might help offset your inet connection tab. Maybe let you afford the nexst tier up. It doesn't hurt any to try, and the concept caters to all three potential customers, free sharers, people who share a little but really need a small fee to help, and those who just want to buy some time and don't want any BS, willing to pay folks. They are *really* trying to make it a universally free service, ideally it seems they want mostly all linuses, but they have *options* because they know there will always be bills and alien types out there. They are both idealistic and practical at the same time. And getting to get a subsidised wireless router is a nice bonus, I wish there were more sorts of hardware buying clubs to get cheaper hardware, based on a similar group buy thing, or possibly designed from scratch to be linux friendly hardware.
It seems very nice, but it is not going to work.
1) The man itself. No one in Spain would buy a used car from Martin Varsavsky.
2) In Spain it's illegal to resell or even share your Internet connection, the contract with the ISP almost always says so. It can be debatable, but it is what you have signed.
In fact, FON has been around for some time with very limited success. It gets mentioned in the news just because Varsavsky is a known celebrity in Spanish ISP world.
Verizon, Covad and Comcast sure aren't going to like this one. If this shit works, three wireless hotspots (channels 1, 6 and 11) per apartment building will be enough. Right now I can see 12 routers in our building and in G range alone. This means Verizon/Comcast have $480 monthly from owners of the routers. If those hotspots are open (as in Linus) or open for a small(er) fee (as in Bill) - they'll get 1/4th of that. If this takes off, Verizon will need to learn to live a much leaner life.
I understand they replace the router's firmware. So I wonder if that new firmware would addresses the problem of sharing your Internet connection without sharing your LAN.
I do have an open access point at home, because I appreciate my ability to use other people's access points when I'm on the road, and so I feel I have to share mine as well.
BUT, I don't want to share my LAN.
It just happens that I do have 2 access points at home, so what I do is that I use the crypted one and leave the other one open for friends, visitors and passers-by.
This is not a very good solution, because I need to remember to switch off the open AP whenever I connect an insecure machine on my LAN (like during OS install, etc.), and every time I switch it back on, I have to think about my notebook's firewall and sharing settings.
What would be really great would be a router solving these problems in an easily configurable way: some authenticated users have access to the whole LAN while others have not.
Until now, the only solution I have seen is a VLAN switch, which is too expensive for home use.
So, you pay an ISP for the connection, then pay them again when you allow others to share it?
That's a sweeet deal. For the ISPs.
Environmentalism is the new Victorianism. Everyone ties on a green corset and pretends we're virtuous.
What's the advantage of VOIP/Cell phone and hotspot, if majority of cell phone doesnt support WIFI?
Gee, wondering what place like starbucks going to charge their customer to do a voip call? they are going to get what ? 0.000025 per min per customer?
I find the idea creative and promising. I think there is a little problem though; as i understand, you download and install the "linus" firmware for your wrt54g and you are able to use the global infrastructure for free. What if your AP is unusable to people (intentionally or otherwise)? For example, i live in a farady case (metaphorically, wireless signal won't get out of the house while cell phone does not work inside), what benefit could i bring to the network as a linus AP ?
If this takes off i would expect a high number of "linus" APs in residential areas and a high number of "bill" APs in commercial ones. Of course a nice strategy is to be both, a "linus" where you expect little bandwidth consumption and a "bill" where you'd expect a high concentration of "aliens".
In this country (Malaysia), wifi is free at Starbucks.
In this country (Japan), wifi is free at Starbucks, as long as one of the nearby businesses forgets to secure their hotspot. ^_^
Don't put advice in your sig.
Not reassuring for you, but it's tytrue for spaniards. I think that Fon's FAQ is actually a direct translation of the spanish one which is not aimed to people living in USA ;-).
In USA the law is different than the law here in Spain you know..!
the bill version gives you a share in the charges.
every fon hotspot will have a cost for 'aliens' and 'bills'
if the hotspot is run by a 'linus' fon will get all the money.
every fon hotspot in the USA will be free, for you, if you run a linus spot- which gets fon more net cash.
but even your own spot, will be provided at a charge to anyone not a 'linus' themselves
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
Slippery legal ground? They offer money to ISPs so it will be done by agreement, they only have to get one ISP in any area to sign up and that ISP will gain more customers who want to use the FON system.
Think about it, all other things being equal, if with one ISP you can use FON and with another not, and you can gain something from it (free roaming) then the ISP who accepts FON will get more customers, plus the revenue share FON are offering.
You don't mention if you use Linux, but that's how I managed this. I don't do Windows enough to know if it's possible that way...
I just set up a spare Linux box with three NICs - one to the cablemodem, one to the wired LAN, one to the AP. Then just set up whatever software you want for isolating / verifying / authenticating. I used OpenVPN to allow access to the wired LAN, although I've considered trying out NoCatAuth as well. I am also thinking about implementing some firewall rules to impose throttling on unauthenticated connections to discourage anyone from saturating my link with P2P or getting too comfy being a leech but if they have proper access (i.e. they have talked to me) they'll get full access.
But, then, I've never had anyone else connect to mine so I haven't bothered to go to the trouble. It's more of an academic learning experience at this point, whenever I have the time.
Granted, this isn't plug-and-play easy setup, but it really isn't that bad. And a lot cheaper than VLAN switches, as you mention.
it isn't google and skype investing in the company, it's the venture capital firms originally associated with the two companies that is doing the investing. you should really read the article you are reporting on before commenting on it.
This is nothing new, this was tried a couple years with a company I worked called Joltage http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/03/30/144020 4&tid=95... Subsequently failed: http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/16/214625 9. Perhaps the dotcom bubble is back...
So when we get to a point where my neighborhood has a few of these Fon Linus networks for me to use, what if I get a Mushroom Network type router and start aggregating the networks to get mondo bandwidth? What if Fon teamed with people like Mushroom or WiBoost to offer this as an option from the get go? I'd love to get both functions rolled into one box.
I've eaten one too many McGriddles while playing Mario Kart. The system works.
OpenWRT is pretty sweet, and FON's concept is actually appealing. But as someone else said there's this nationwide free WiFi network with the ssid "linksys" that's free, anonymous and available in virtually every major metropolitan area - though mostly in the residential areas for some strange reason. :)
A proportionate charge is OK. What isn't OK is the gouging in which some hotels indulge, such as those using Swisscom Eurospot. For the 24 hour charge you could have home broadband for a month or two - and then they put a download cap on it too! It's tempting just to hack into another local WLAN.
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
Put a wired NAT router upstream from you crypted and non-crypted access points. Then, traffic can flow up from your APs but not across the AP boundary unless you explicitly allow it. It's a slight pain, but it happens to work fairly well. I have this set up implemented, and while port forwarding becomes a two stage process (wired NAT router->correct wireless->correct machine), it works fairly well and I haven't had and problems.
The Fon site openly claims that many ISPs won't allow this kind of wireless sharing. They state repeatedly that Speakeasy is an exception to this rule. The fact is that as either a kind of member you will charge "aliens" and "bills" to connect to your point. Charging for sharing access is strictly forbidden by speakeasy unless done via speakeasy's wi-fi sharing service "NetShare"
Thier service is actually quite neat. Without any firmware needed, they track the MAC addresses on your IPs. You then login with your speakeasy id or other customers log in with theirs and agree to pay for access at the price you set. As the administrator you can choose to throttle the bandwidth shared in this way (which is managed by speakeasy's routers, so again, no software/hardware needed), and you get 80% of the fees collected.
I guess those who want to know more could use a link:
http://www.speakeasy.net/netshare/learnmore/
[Disclaimer, I don't use this service, I merely share my wi-fi. In new york there are enough shadows and wierdnesses to make my efforts pointless to all but my immediate neighbors.]
Part of the reasons Starbucks charges for internet access is to help keep the customers rotating their way out of the shop.
I've seen it a million times, someone will plunk down a laptop and start camping out. Those people can tie up a table for an hour or two, which is bad from a business standpoint.
It's also partly about the atmosphere you want to create in the stores. Do you want tables full of chatty customers, people with their noses stuffed into books or solo campers who're glued to their laptop.
Stores can control the mix by varying lighting, music volume, table size, access to electric plugs, how comfortable the chairs are... you get the idea.
Free WiFi isn't always the great idea it seems like at first glance.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
A real wifi network could do cell switching because besides the role as AP, all the nodes are networked between them. So a node could communicate the rest of the network that it is servicing a movile device and that it has already been asigned a network number as well as a NAT and gateway for external internet access.
A serious developer could even thing IPv6 and roaming protocols from the IETF.
"I personally think Richard would be more appropiate than Linus. The freeness of Linux in particular and GNU/Linux in general comes from RMS's ideals, or more precisely his expression of some ideals common to many people. Linus has done a great job, but the antithesis of Windows is GNU."
Actually, BSD is the antithesis of Windows, because it is the only completely free OS. RMS's GNU puts strings on it's "free" software that limit how you can distribute modified copies.
Vote for Pedro
Basically sounds like BitTorrent protocol ported to physical network access issues.
You don't mention if you use Linux
...
Not really at home. My notebook is WinXP, the family machine is dual-boot XP/Linux. The servers I take care of are all Linux, but there is none of these at home. So
I just set up a spare Linux box with three NICs
that's not what I would like to do, even though it would work very well indeed. But I neither want to spend the time to set it up, nor do I want to have a bulky machine with a fan (the only ones I have for free) eat up space for something which I don't really need.
Besides, I'm not only looking at a sloution to this for myself.
My point is that I would like many people to share their connection (knowingly, not accidentaly). So I need to be able to recommend to the people who ask my advice a router which would allow such safe connection sharing. I cannot tell them "buy 2 routers instead of 1, to be nice to passers-by", or "take this $300 VLAN switch instead of that $30 switch because you would make some total strangers happy".