$5 Social Wi-Fi Router

slashjunkie writes "BBC News is running a story about the Spanish firm Fon, selling subsidized Linksys WRT54GL Wi-Fi routers for $5, in exchange for the buyer agreeing to a 12 month contract of providing access to other Fon users within range. With the financial backing of Google and Skype, their goal is to create Wi-Fi networks, street by street, across Europe and the US. Buyers of the subsidized routers can classify themselves as 'Linuses', whereby they also get free access to all other Fon hotspots, or 'Bills', where they receive 50% of the revenue made by on-selling their Wi-Fi to other Fon users. 'Alien' users can buy 24-hour passes for 3 Euro. To deter misuse, all Fon users must identify themselves by a username and password before they can access the hotspot. As long as the owner's personal LAN is not accessible, this could be a good way to offset the costs of the average geek's bandwidth bill."

Comments

TOS

[ronanbear]

Most broadband providers specifically prohibit you from sharing your connection in this manner. If something like this were to become popular they'd just have to start clamping down on it.

Re:TOS

[NekoXP]

Speakeasy (www.speakeasy.net) encourage it though, which is ace.

Although I can't find the page which explains it outside of my account pages (needs login, sigh) you can resell your connection and also sell your neighbours all-new connections, using a plan they have in place.

This has been there for yeaaars.

Re:TOS

[arivanov]

Can you imagine 20 users at a coffee shop trying to use WiFi voice at the same time?

No probs. The 802.11a,b,g family has two different MAC schemes (the idea is stolen from Cable actually).

There is a random access scheme similar to the ancient ethernet. In that case 20 VOIP users will simply bring the link down by trying to access the media.

There is also a scheme under which the AP will transmit maps which tell each client when to transmit. I do not have the time to do the exact math at the time, but it should be possible to accommodate 20 VOIP clients using this MAC and leave some breathing space for normal access (not a lot though). The problem is that for this scheme to be usefull the clients must have means of getting reservations from the AP. Tough luck - no such clients out there. Similarly, the AP must have an integrated Layer2-Layer3 filtering mechanism which hooks up straight into MAC and creates transmit maps based on statefull filter context. Once again - tough luck. There is no such AP out there (AFAIK). On top of that while this is in the spec it is hardly in use anywhere so the level of testing clients have is very low. I would expect some of the more cheap and cheerfull clients which do MAC portions in software to be broken with regard to this.

Re:So what?

[dissolved]

They're not that cheap everywhere... check out eBuyer (www.ebuyer.co.uk). I paid about $80 or so for mine in the UK.

Re:What if

[Library Spoff]

Having only quickly looked at the site this morning... They are either another member of FON, or have paid to use your connection. So surely it's the same if someone did those things at starbucks/McDonalds etc etc

Re:So what?

[fistfullast33l]

From their "shop":

Remember that you must register your router and keep it on at all times. This great low price helps us build the FON Community. Therefore, we will apply a $/€ 45 surcharge on all routers that have not been registered within 30 days of having made the purchase

So if you buy the router and don't activate it, they'll charge you $45 or €45 depending on where you live? It isn't really clear which value they go by, but I imagine it depends on what currency you used to purchase it. Personally, I think it's better for them to charge a flat €45 since it's worth almost 1.5 times the dollar at this point.

For the love of (insert Deity here) RTA b4 comment

[dizzy8578]

Try this one if you like a little more info.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/275421_goog le27.html

And Google if you want more.

The software is available for download if you already have a compatable router.
The $5 router is new but the warranty is null since the firmware is flashed with the FON version.

The firmware can split your bw between two ssid's one for FON and the other for private. Since the routers listed can be used with linux in the first place, (even the low ram ones per a Slashdot story from the past) then it is a good guess as to what the firmware is based on.

The router will indeed FON home (User>pass auth) and the interoperability and potential multipath routing seems inevitable when the density reaches a critical point in a particular area. (yes this is a guess rather than something in the site literature.)

But it seems like a good deal with little risk to the hot spot provider. The basic access is tracked and limited to users by password whether Linuses, Bills or Aliens.

ISP's who like to limit their users deserve to feel the slight pain of savvy users leaving for better ISP's.

I intend to dedicate one of my public IP's to the system and my ISP does not give a rats patoot what I do with is as long as I pay my bill and abuse does not get any valid complaints. I moved from comcast long ago and since my qwest router is bridged from my isp, Qwest has no say in how my bandwidth is used either.

  Of course I live in a city where my wifi detector finds free open signals by the dozens at nearly every traffic light, I suspect some folks here will split off a portion of their BW if there is a potential of making a little money for their service.

I will become a Linus just to help the concept of universal wi-fi along if only a little bit. I am going to upgrade my wifi net anyway once the N becomes semi standard so I will have 3 FON compat routers to share with the neighborhood while keeping my private network kinda tight.

But go to the site and read for your self the details of the program.
http://en.fon.com/info/whats_fon.php

Then make your own pithy comments here. :)

Beware of SpeakEasy, they do not necessarily honor

[ClioCJS]

...their service contracts, or pre-sales claims.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/clintjcl/76331315/in/ photostream/

Simply observe the chat above. I tried to make it abundantly clear that I could use 100% of my bandwidth 100% of the time. Within 6 months, after repeated harassment, they gave me an ultimatum: Use less than 100G per month, or be terminated.

Ultimately I was terminated. A few months later, I finally got $50 back; originally they were trying to charge me the $300 cancellation fee even though it was they who cancelled me, not the other way around.

In talking with thier esclation director, he admitted that I was having zero impact on network performance.

And, they say "no bots". And they consider bittorrent a fucking bot, if you'll believe that.

This was AFTER I installed a scheduler that basically only downloaded at 10% capacity during business hours. That wasn't good enough.

Buyer beware. SpeakEasy is nothing but another faceless corporation in my eyes. I've returned to the land of Mom-and-Pop ISPs. Silcon.com doesn't have great performance, but they leave me alone.