fontastic.org - FON and free WiFi blog » 2006

FONtastic.org and FON in the NY Times September 27, 2006

Today (9/27), the NY Times has published an article on FON and I am honored to be part of the story. Tim Gnatek had interviewed me a couple of weeks ago and Michael, a photographer for the NY Times came to my office and took this nice photo. You can find the article here (3rd down) or here but only if you sign-up for the 14 days trial membership (no obligation). Here is an excerpt covering my involvement and fontastic.org:

"ALTHOUGH he runs his own business, Olaf Kreitz is a socialist when it comes to Internet connections. In the window of Braintransfer, his Internet consulting company in Manhattan, Mr. Kreitz has mounted a special wireless router from Fon, a start-up company based in Spain that is trying to build a hot-spot network around the world. He hopes passers-by will make free use of his extra bandwidth.

Mr. Kreitz gets something in return for his largess: as part of a Wi-Fi sharing community being developed by Fon, he can log on free to other members’ wireless broadband connections in a growing network of citizen-powered hot spots.

“I love the idea, sharing your Wi-Fi and being able to surf the Internet wherever you find a hot spot,” he said.

Six months after he joined the Fon community, Mr. Kreitz remains optimistic, despite having had some difficulties logging on to nearby Fon access points, and the fact that his own location had been mismarked on Fon’s hot spot location map (recently updated to show active hot spots and to help users correct errors). He said he thought the company would struggle for some time to solve such network troubles.

“It’s going to be difficult,” said Mr. Kreitz, who writes a personal Web log, www.fontastic.org, that tracks matters related to Fon and its members, called Foneros.(…)"