ET Fon Home

One of my personal projects at the moment is to look at a good way of getting Wifi minutes whilst I'm out and about, at a reasonable price.  Whilst 3G and HSDPA are great in built-up area's, often its quite easy to stray out into the countryside and find that one is lacking in Internet connection.  Whilst this is fine for a few hours, I'm a little bit addicted to the 'net so wanted to find an option whereby I could stop by a wifi point perhaps once a day and synchronise my e-mails, update my twitter and perhaps dial into my satellite box and schedule a programme to record.  I used to maintain a BT Openzone account, but this was costing me around £15 per month when I only needed it for 'occasional' use. 

So, during my research, I hit upon a product called La Fonera from a Spanish company,  Fon!  Their ethic is to offer a shared wireless service, where hotspot owners get free access to other Fonspots.  This works by a user acquiring one or more Fonspots and plugging it into your existing broadband router.  

The Fon router has two networks, the public Fonspot, and the private internal network, ensuring that any 'public' access is kept separate from the internal network, ensuring that a) People are less likely to try and break into your secure network just to gain internet access, and b) You cannot be held responsible for any illegal usage on the public network (all access requires you to be a member of the Fon community and requires logon).

There are 3 types of Fon users -

• Fonero's - People who own and run one or more FonSpots.  Fonero's who share this connection may use all other Fonspots free of charge.  Fonero's also receive a portion of the proceeds of any access passes sold through their Fonspot.
• Aliens - People who do not share their network, and must pay to use a Fonspot.
• BTFON - BT Broadband users who configure their routers to allow Fon connections.

The latter type of user is a BT Total Broadband customer (generally with a HomeHub) who enables the Fon service on their router.  This allows them to become a member of the Fon community without buying a specialist router, however, they are unable to receive payment for any credit sold through their Access Point.  This agreement however has vastly increased the coverage of the Fon service and made the service more appealing to UK customers.   Other international ISPs have also agreed to offer similar coverage in their local country. 

Fonspots can be located using the maps.fon.com site, a Google Maps service with Fonspots located, and it is also possible to download a Points of Interest file from the site for a particular country (or countries) you may be interested in.

Unfortunately, the delivery service is a bit poor - I've just been told that they should arrive within the next 3 weeks, so time will tell how the service will be, and if I make any money off it, but the major point to the exercise is to be able to get reasonable speed wifi whilst I'm out and indeed about.