fontastic.org - FON and free WiFi blog » 2006

Free Fonero from a Fonero friend December 21, 2006

Starting today, FON launches the "Fonero gets Fonero" program (details here). Every registered Fonero can invite up to 3 friends to become Foneros as well and let them pick up a La Fonera router for free (shipping included). Just log in and send out your invitations. Your friend will find a link to the shop after sign-up where a La Fonero router waits to be checked out for $0 (or €0 in Europe).

The team behind Fontastic.org has just launched a new baby. It's not a whole new thing but we just wanted to come up with something that helps us keeping track with our beloved Gadget blogs and sites. GadgetGlance.com does precisely this and we gonna add on features to it whenever we have time and think of something extremely useful. Thanks very much to those many nice Web 2.0 APIs and developments which helped making this possible. To have at least some sort of connection to Fontastic.org we might want to point out that there is a very fast and lean mobile version available (optimized for Treo 650, that's what I use mostly).

Yep, that's right. Apparently Apple needs to find a new name for its upcoming TPFNAI (The phone formerly known as iPhone) as Cisco launches the iPhone series, comprising 7 WiFi/ Skype phones under their brand Linksys. They, not Apple have trademarked it. And a nice series this is, too. There are 4 new Skype/ Yahoo phones (CIT) and 3 WiFi phones (WIP). The CIT 400 (see picture) is a cordless, pc-less Skype phone which you can also connect to your standard telephone line (PSTN). Its DECT standard allows to connect your other DECT phones to the base station, too (up to 4 handsets). The line of WiFi phones features two SIP phones and a Skype phone. The WIP 330 allows you to connect to hotspots via a built in browser which makes it the ideal FON phone.

Related Link: iPhone Apple by Rogers in Canada

SMC Skype phone arrived: first impression (video) December 13, 2006

About a week ago I ordered the Skype SMC phone/ La Fonera bundle. Yesterday the phone arrived (unfortunately without the router). As my Linksys doesn't work anymore my FON access point is out of order and I connected it to a WPA secured AP in my office. It worked like a breeze. It's great, time and Skype credit appears automatically in the display and all contacts appear in an ordered list (online first, then phone contacts and last offline contacts - the way you want it to be). Sound quality is great, too, but as far as I can tell after one full charge the battery life is ridicolous: the phone went down after half a day of standby and one 30 min talk. Well let's see, sometimes those batteries need a couple of cycles. Here are my videos:

UPDATE: Second charge cycle lasted for 2 days of stand-by with a couple of short calls.

Google, one of FONs investors has also invested in Meraki Networks. Their mesh technology is based on a former MIT project (Roofnet project). Meraki offers both a mesh-enabled router (Meraki Mini) at $49.- during the beta program (around $100 thereafter) plus a mesh-network management software (hosted by Meraki) that enables organisations building up and managing WLAN networks easily and quickly. The big plus of a mesh network is that each node (router) can be access point and repeater at the same time and therefore not every access point needs an internet connection. In other words, in a perfect mesh network you could reach thousands of users via hundreds of meshed routers with only one connection to the internet. In reality, you probably end up connecting 10 - 20% of your nodes to the internet.

The Meraki-Mini looks pretty similar to the La Fonero and the single-chip controller is also manufactured by Atheros. Here are some specs (via Meraki Wiki):

180MHz MIPS CPU (Atheros AR2315 SoC)
8MB Flash, 32MB SDRAM
60mW 802.11b/g radio
External RP-SMA antenna connector, internal chip diversity antenna
10/100 Mbit/s auto-crossover Ethernet port
Headers for 3.3v serial port, GPIO pins
5.6-18V DC tolerance, for use in developing countries or with batteries
Power-over-Ethernet support (non-802.3af)
Includes 2dBi antenna and 7.5V DC power supply.

One of the great features is that you can power the Meraki-Mini over Ethernet. As stated earlier, I guess this technology would have been a great basis for FON as well and would help making the FON network more accessable and spread faster (one could apply for a free router in repeater mode if you lived in an appropriate location for example). Well, as Google is on board in both worlds we see what happens.

These days, Fon has turned one and we want to congratulate to a great year of success. Despite the ethernal dispute on how many hotspots are really accessible or not, we think FON has been able to make some impact on the entire WiFi scene. There are more and more me-toos showing up (yes, FON itself is also a mee-too, if you insist) but still, FONs figures are impressive:

160.000 hotspots worldwide (active and temporarily passive ones)
more than 15.000 La Fonera routers ordered in Germany and Austria alone (half of which already delivered)
hotspots available in about 69 countires worldwide
cash-burn rate of about $600.000 per month

It looks like they can match their goals and if they really break even as of 500.000 hotspots, they might be around for a while. Hope you had a great party!

Photo: by Indie Charly (via Flickr)

The City of Blanquefort in the west of France has bought 1000 La Fonera routers. They will be distributed for free (as a Christmas present if you will) amoungst DSL subscribers in town who are willing to share their bandwidth with others. The City Hall will even help setting the router up. Blanquefort, that calls itself "Ville Internet", is pretty advanced with regards to internet technology. They have blogs, vlogs and podcasts available about different topics such as the renovation of the town hall, for example. With only 15.000 inhabitants, the city will have almost 7% foneros just from this initiative.