fontastic.org - FON and free WiFi blog » 2006

New Skype phone: works on FON? April 21, 2006

The new Netgear Skype phone finally hits the shelves (Fonternet reports). The question is, when will this and other WiFi phones work on FON? Some foneros reported they couldn't connect to FON with their (SIP) WiFi phones which is obvious as for now you have to logon via the FON login website (and need a browser to do so). Anyways, we hope this feature is ready when the phone is here. We (pre-) ordered ours today on Amazon and here is the link.

We are really proud to announce our new service: we want to invite everyone to sign-up with us for your free blog! Yes, that's right, you will get your own blog, your own choice of Wordpress themes and a nice, personalized URL (http://yourname.fontastic.org). We want to give everyone the opportunity to blog about FON and the free WiFi movement so feel free to spread the word. We will add more and more features to the community (e.g. we are currently working on a single RSS feed for all fontastic blogs). Speaking about features for the FON community, we also added our FONtastic board for any help you might seek. The main purpose is to support our free blogs but feel free to use it for any discussion you think is interesting and related to FON and WiFi.

FON on Wikipedia April 15, 2006

FON is already on Wikipedia and as a matter of fact the entry is quite informative. I have just added two more ISPs based in the US that allow to share WiFi via FON and others (we actually discovered this on the NYC Wireless homepage first). Check it out here and add usefull information.

Fondoo.net - a new FON-friendly ISP in the UK

Prepaid wireless FON cards for Aliens April 11, 2006

mock-up of a soon to come FON prepaid card

A convenient way to allow Aliens to use the FON network is by selling airtime thru prepaid wireless access cards. Sure, FON needs to focus on building up the network first but at the same time monetizing early in the process helps accelerating this. The preferred sales channels for prepaid cards are obviously retails chains and convenience stores. It probably helps that one of the funding partners of FON, Sequoia Capital also has the largest distributor of prepaid cards in their portfolio: the Green Dot Corporation. They sell thru more than 50.000 retailers including Rite Aid, CVS Pharmacy, RadioShack, Walgreens, and others. Additionally, Green Dot offers financial services that allow POS recharging of prepaid cards.

Our mock-up shows how we envision the FON prepaid card to look like. Please note that we have added a "presented by" field which could be used for "Super-Bills" or retail partners of FON cards.

EarthLink to change FON policy? April 6, 2006

After today's official announcement of Google & EarthLink having been selected by the City of San Francisco to build up a municipal (free) WiFi network, the question remains open whether or not EarthLink's policy towards WiFi sharing changes. As reported yesterday (see below), EarthLink's terms and conditions leave end-users in limbo. While EarthLink doesn't explicitly disallow sharing we feel it would be helpful to get their official position.
Meanwhile Engadget reports that users in San Francisco will be able to use a 300 kbps WiFi connection free of charge (ad-financed) or 1 mbps without ads. Leaves not much room for Aliens or Bills at the current pricing model as the residential user probably wouldn't want to spend $60 per month and visitors might just opt for the free model (if this is possible). But I bet Martin Varsavsky has some sort of solution for this dilemma as well as it is in Google's best interest to support FON.

Wireless friendly ISPs - wrap up ! April 5, 2006

One of the most important success factors of FON is obviously whether or not FON is able to bring ISPs on board to allow sharing enduser's WiFi. Sure, there might be some money in for them at some point. But what about here and now? We have done some investigation and found two great websites that tell you all about it: EFF's Wireless-Friendly ISPSs and ISP Wireless Policies. For a brief overview check the following table:

ISP	Where?	Sharing allowed?
AceDSL	New York
bway.net	New York
Cablevision - Optimum Online	New York
AT&T Broadband	nationwide
Earthlink	nationwide
Speakeasy	nationwide
Verizon DSL	nationwide
Time Warner Cable	nationwide

= allowed and supported
= allowed
= grey (check before you FON)
= not allowed

Thanks to William of the official FON blog we have been fonblogged! They also refer to our Nokia 770 review. Thanks for your nice words. But we also want to say hi to all the other blogger out there that help getting the free WiFi movement to receive so much attention these days. Thanks, Steve at FONternet.com and Gerhard at fonblog.de. With our next sidebar update we add a link, too.

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Nokia 770 - a FON killer device? April 3, 2006

Free, ubiquitous WiFi is great - but you don't want to carry around your 3 lb laptop all the time. So, what is a real killer device for Fon and free WiFi networks? Obviously, browsing the web is the number on application. Email, IM and VoIP are probably the next important tasks you want to do when you are away from your desk. In the course of finding the killer device for Fon we thought the Nokia 770 might be a good point to start. We purchased it for $299 at CompUSA. This promotion has ended unfortunately but it's available for $349 almost everywhere (e.g. here on Amazon). It comes with a nice aluminium cover, a pouch, charger, USB cable and 64MB reduced size MMC. You turn it on and there is the first whoa effect: the display is amazing! Connecting to our FONtastic access point (via the FON network) was easy but unfortunately you have to login each time you turn the device off. The Opera browser also doesn't seem to save form entries of any kind and you have to re-type both email and password every time again. This is a bit of a pain but other that that browsing the internet is just great - as a matter of fact, compared to all PDA-ish devices I used to surf the web, this is the greatest experience ever! Nearly every webpage actually looks like it does on your desktop browser. Despite of the lack of memory and processor power, internet browsing is really fast, too. However, if you open more apps at a time (e.g. the bookmarks manager) slows down the Nokia 770 remarkably. But there are both de.icio.us and Bloglines apps available that help to manage bookmarks a great deal. Almost every application available for the Nokia 770 (which runs a Debian Linux derivate) can be found on the Maemo.org website.

Instant messaging is solved thru a GAIM port and we have been able to IM to Microsoft Messenger and GTalk buddies. Now we can't wait to use the Nokia 770 for VoIP. There is a SIP client out there but currently it can't be downloaded. Skype would be the killer app for the killer device (Nokia 770) on the killer network (FON). There is Debian client available but reading the Skype forum it appears not to be too easy to actually port it to the 770. If Skype was open source it would be there already, I guess, but as it's not we have to wait and hope. Stay tuned for more field reports on the Nokia 770.