300,000 new Free WiFi HotSpots October 18, 2006
French ISP Free opens all 300,000 WiFi hot spots of their users to be used by any subscriber to Free. If you have signed up with Free you can from now on roam anywhere you find a Free hotspot and make free VoIP phone calls (roaming is restricted to 64kbps). Frees set top boxes will have this feature turned on by default, all other users need to switch this on to be effective.
Is this a threat for FON? Well, I guess yes and no. In France this means some competition, no doubt. But it will also help FON. First of all, the whole free WiFi idea (or movement if you will) gets more momentum. Plus, even Free users can only roam within France whereas Foneros roam worldwide. Once you get used to it in France you might want to join FON as well to be able of taking advantage of free WiFi everywhere.
- Posted in : free WiFi, FON, ISP, WiFi Services, fonero
- Author : admin
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In one fell swoop free vastly surpasses the number of FON routers worldwide (even if you assume that 10% of Free routers will be active and if you even double or quintuple the figures from http://tech.am/2006/09/25/the-real-fon-statistics-%E2%80%93-lies-manipulation-or-fantasy/) so I’m not sure FON will be helped by this in France. In the US it’s another story since no ISP is even remotely close to what Free is doing, be it feature- or price-wise… Sadly.
Did anyone take the time to actually read what Free are doing in France? Those 300,000 Freebox HD are NOT WiFi hotspots.
1) only Free subscribers who own a Freebox HD modem/router and live in a unbundled area can use them
2) You can only use someone else’s Freebox HD to make VOIP calls
3) VOIP calls via the Frebox HD can only be made through Free’s WiFi phone.
So, not exactly what i call “surpassing” FON.