Hands-on with Fon... but why?

I really wanted to love Fon. I hoped to glowingly write up a crucial stage in the spread of ubiquitous Wi-Fi and, heck, the evolution of society itself! But, well, read on...

Fon is a Spanish-based global "Wi-Fi community". When you sign up on their website, you get a subsidised (it only costs €40/$40) wireless router in the post, which you then hook up to your broadband connection. The router provides two SSIDs, which effectively means you then have a private network for your own use, as well as a public network. You can choose how much bandwidth you allocate to this public network, but basically you're creating a new Fon hotspot.

A few weeks ago Fon celebrated its first birthday by giving away its routers to those who signed up on the day. So I put my name down, and my router pitched up about a week ago. I tried it this last weekend, and here are my thoughts.

Firstly, and somewhat crucially, it's not a very good router. Now, this may have just been an issue with my unit, but I had dismally patchy connectivity through both private and public networks, and that factor alone meant I was soon back on my trusty Belkin.

But even without that issue, I was left less than impressed with the ethos behind the thing. When you install your router you can become either a "Linus" or a "Bill" (geddit?), with a Linus being someone who "shares" their Wi-Fi at home and gets to use other Fon hotspots for free, and a Bill being someone who charges people to use their Wi-Fi (albeit at a very reasonable €3/$3 a day) and keeps half the takings, with the rest going to Fon.

And here's the thing. If you have a coffee shop or whatever, and you want to set up a cheap hotspot (free hotspots are better, but hey), then getting Fon and becoming a Bill makes pretty good sense, as the split SSID thing is really handy. Unfortunately, being a Linus... well, being a Linus is being a bit of a sucker. If you were really just giving away Wi-Fi, then the idea would earn a great big socialist "yeah" from me (and, I like to think, Mr Torvalds himself). But you're not - all you're doing is letting Fon make money off people by using your connection and giving you diddly-squat.

What do you get out of that? For a start, it makes very little sense in a UK residential neighbourhood where most people have their own connectivity anyway. If someone was visiting your home and wanted to use the internet, it wouldn't exactly be sociable to have them pay for the privilege - you'd just give them your password. Yes, you could theoretically surf other Fon hotspots for free but, although there are a surprising number of them out there, there are not nearly enough to make it a certainty that you'll be passing one when you need it.

It's not yet a mature network or a mature business model. It's not nearly as "community"-oriented as it makes itself out to be and, if it is to succeed, Fon will need to form a lot more partnerships with ISPs like BT (who may or may not be in talks with Fon). For a provider like BT, it would obviously make sense to turn all their "home hubs" into hotspots, thus expanding their hotspot/hotzone coverage at the cost of, well, nothing - their customers would be paying for it all. If they managed to sell their customers on the profit-sharing "Bill" model, then maybe it would fly. Otherwise, I don't think many people would be too keen to spread the Wi-Fi love for someone else's profit and little more.