Like a terrible blog meme, the recent news about FON is spreading like a bad case of syphillis across the blogocube.
What is FON?
In their own words,
FON is a Global Community of people who share WiFi. Share your WiFi broadband access at home/work and enjoy WiFi all over the world! FON: small cost, great benefit!
Wow! That sounds, well, almost exactly what we've been doing for the past half-decade...
Generic corporate marketing copy aside, FON has been garnering serious attention recently, now that they've got bigshots such as Google and Skype as investors. To become a fonero - which sounds like a very bad spanish curse word I'd call one of my worst enemies (Hey, you effin' fonero!) - you need to either purchase one of their customized Linksys WRT54g routers (which are being sold very cheaply I might add) or use their own custom firmware on your Linksys router.
For now, FON's coverage is insignificant. With their new gorillas in tow, however, it's a good bet that they'll expand very quickly, grabbing marketshare for themselves and padding the bottom lines of ISPs. In fact that's the whole goal of FON, as stated by FON founder Martin Varsavsky on his blog: "I created FON as a way to build a global wifi network and boost ISP revenue."
What scares me the most, however, isn't that some generic tech company got some funding and it threatening to insidiously destroy all the progress that community wireless groups have made - it's that smart people are actually being tricked into believing its hype and FUD.
For example, Ethan says:
I’ve looked closely at projects designed to build community wireless networks and have been frustrated that many of these projects seem designed explicitly for nations where bandwidth is cheap. Most let users share their bandwidth, but don’t provide a way to charge other users for using that bandwidth, or to “throttle back” users who clog your pipe downloading films from Limewire. There’s a philosophical bias to many of these projects - a belief that Internet access is an inalienable right and should be free - that I find charming, but totally impractical for the parts of the world I’m most concerned about.
Well, you obviously didn't look that closely, Ethan. Almost every single open-source Linksys WRT54g distro available today has some form of bandwidth shaping and limiting options, to "throttle back" any amount of bandwidth from users who abuse the network. You can create custom rules based on what ports, services, even MAC addresses you want to favor / limit.
The point is that everything FON does / lets you do, is done better, faster, easier and more securely by an open-source community wireless (or several) out there. The staments
"But I do think FON’s potentially incredibly important for the developing world and that’s largely why I agreed to get involved with the project."
and
I suspect FON will make a great deal of sense in many developing nations.
both demonstrate that you haven't really paid any serious attention to what's already out there, and by not doing so, you're comprimising groups that are having a very real effect on the developing world right now. Surely you know of Wireless Ghana, the wireless mesh project in Apirede, Ghana, using open-source mesh technology developed by cuwireless?
When I think of the $20M raised by FON and how it would be used, it's pretty depressing, really. Regarding sustainable development in the developing world, ten percent of that would go further under a properly-managed OSS group than that $20M will go under FON.
Can both FON and community wireless groups unwire, say, Africa? Sure they can. They also each have side effects:
FON - Lots of money gets pumped back outside of Africa.
CWN - Lots of geeks learn about wireless technology in Africa.
You do the math. 