“Fonero” – what the hell is that?! Yes, if you haven’t heard about this term before you might be a bit confused, but fear not. “Fon” is a spanish-based award-winning wifi-community where you can get free or cheap wifi-access (meaning that you make money on your own FON access-point) wherever there might be a Fon wifi-router around. The Fon “what-is” webpage sums this up pretty well;
“FON is the largest WiFi community in the world. Our members share their wireless Internet access at home and, in return, enjoy free WiFi wherever they find another Fonero’s Access Point.”
Watch the above video for a short run-through on what FON is all about (I am sooooo sorry for the South Park ripoff though 
)
Now you might think to yourself: -”Aren’t there any security concerns with sharing my wifi with others?!” My answer to this is… no. This text from the FON webpage sums it up pretty well for you:
“La Fonera offers you two wireless network signals (SSIDs), a private and a public one. The private signal is encrypted and offers you complete privacy.
The public signal will be accessible to Foneros only. This signal is the one that turns your broadband connection into a FON Access Point.
Furthermore, all Foneros connecting to the public WiFi signal within the FON Community are registered users. They need to identify themselves by a username and password.
Running an Access Point with La Fonera is not only secure but also easy to control. You can choose the amount of bandwidth you want to share.”
On top of this you can limit the speed allocated to the users on your FON SSID.
In essence; Martin Varsavsky, the founder and Chief Executive Officer of FON, has struck gold when it comes to having and going through with a brilliant idea! He also managed to get funds and support from both Google and Skype, which speaks well for the future of the FON-network. A note in this context is that Google helps FON out with the technical infrastructure.
My personal experience with FON is that it is pretty easy to set up. If you have a DSL-modem, Internet access directly from your ISP through a TP-cable (twisted pair) or through cable-modem it is no sweat to get it to run. The Fon access-point will then get it’s IP-address automatically (via DHCP) from the source it is connected to through it’s Internet-port and then the rest of the information how to get rolling is stated in the information packed with your router-package. The Fon access-point even works in a NAT if you run this at your office / home, though this might mean that you have to go into the access-point and edit a couple of settings regarding which network segment the access-point is in etc.
I really didn’t have any problems besides a bug in my Intel wifi-card sitting in my laptop related to the card’s energy-saving mode. (This isn’t fixed even with the latest drivers even if you said it would be, shame on you Intel.)
Apart from the mishap mentioned above, my first week being a Fonero has gone without a glitch. The access-point I got from FON works well, I can utilize my entire allocated bandwidth from my ISP and the access-point seem to be able to handle high bandwidth and durable datastreams. All protocols work fine, protocols demanding low latency such as server-management via SSH works as good as it would through my TP cable-based connection.
Another important aspect of joining a service is the support you get if something goes wrong, and I can say that the support at FON are knowledgeable and friendly, so if you ever run into a problem you can count on getting help from them.
Do you find all of this interesting?! Then don’t hesitate and join the Fonera network to either get free wifi-access wherever you are (Linus), or make a buck on sharing your Internet connection with the world (Bill)!!! (I am a “Linus”)
Take care everyone!!!
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