$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

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?

[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.