$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

So what?

[denebian devil]

Routers are so cheap nowadays (I got my wifi router a few years ago for $25, and wired routers regularly go for $5 or $10), why would you want to get one just a tad bit cheaper for the "privilege" of sharing it with others?

Re:So what?

[shawb]

Because you also get the privelege of using the router of anyone else who has the service. Assuming wide enough adoption, this would mean you could use Wi-Fi pretty much anywhere. Not very useful for me right now as I don't have a laptop (and not to mention it's probably not widespread enough.) I can, however, see that in the future this would be extremely convienient. Especially if we are able to figure out an alternative I/O to the standard mouse/keyboard/screen model that would take up much smaller real estate than a laptop... basically access to the internet's information wherever you go. I can see why the company is trying to get entrenched in this business early... it will be the future of communications. The question is whether this particular company will be around long enough to reap the fruit of it's labor.

Re:So what?

[truthsearch]

Why would there be people camped outside your house if the whole point of the project is to get wi-fi coverage over very large areas?

Re:So what?

[phillips321]

I dont like this idea at all. What if me and my neighbour both have this service? I use my connection for normal usage and connect to his on another computer when i wish to do bandwidth hogging P2P, consequently my browsing recieves no slow down, yet his does....

What if another memeber of this services uses my WiFi AP to connect to kiddie porn?

A few days later, a few knocks on my door.......

Re:So what?

[tinkerghost]

Especially if we are able to figure out an alternative I/O to the standard mouse/keyboard/screen model that would take up much smaller real estate than a laptop.

Well for the whole keyboard/mouse issue you can fall back to a Chorded keyboard'. Figure a trackball sized pad strapped on your hip for one handed operation.(no, the other hand is not for that)
For the display you could always try a head mounted display. The one pictured in the wiki is for stereo gaming, but they also make them to display on a single eyepiece.

Re:So what?

[Da_Weasel]

Then they did so by logging in with their Fon username/pass, and thus the traffic is identifiable so long as some sort of logging takes place.

BTW, I paid $75 for my wireless router, and I share with anyone that comes with in range. My essid is 'useme'. It's never caused me any problems. You can easily seperate your local network from the subnet that is used for wireless access, or simply setup a firewall between the local network and the AP. There are plenty of ways to protect your local network, although I would hope that this subsidized router would have something like this builtin because most of the people buying them probably won't understand the security issues involved.

What if

[Life700MB]

What if someone uses your 5 euros ( = 6.5 bucks) subsidized router to download kiddie porn, send hate mail to CmdrTaco or skype Bin Laden?

What do the European laws say about that?


--
Superb hosting 20GB Storage, 1_TB_ bandwidth, php, mysql, ssh, $7.95