Would you Share?

I recently had one of those “make you go hmmmm” moments, although it is not overly Secondlife orientated, gave me a moment of pause to consider… how all of us “living” in Secondlife have broadband connections and how this product and idea would come to play with Secondlife members.

What caused this moment in my life was “FON”.  What is Fon you ask? Most of the following is pretty much copied and pasted from http://en.fon.com/info/whats_fon.php Fon started as a simple idea. Why should you pay for Internet access on the go when you have already paid for it at home? Exactly, you shouldn’t. So Fon has decided to help create a community of people who get more out of their connection through sharing.

“hmmmm” what about safety and security”? More on that a little later.

Members of the FON Community are called Foneros. It’s simple to become a Fonero. You just need to buy La Fonera, (hmmmm buy?) which enables you to securely and fairly share your home broadband connection with other Foneros.

Then when you’re away from home and you need Internet access, just log on to a FON Access Point, and you can use the Internet for free. You don’t need to take your router with you – you just need to remember your Fonero login and password.

You can find thousands of FON Access Points worldwide.

As the world of WiFi is growing, you can do more and more for free. For example soon we will launch the Skype FON - a cool WiFi handset that lets you make free Internet calls from any FON Access Point.

What does being a Fonero mean?

Foneros are members of the FON Community. There are actually three types of Fonero:

• Most of us are Linuses. That means that we share our WiFi at home and in return get free WiFi wherever we find a FON Access Point.

• Aliens are people who don’t share their WiFi yet. We charge them just €/$ 3 for a Day Pass to access the FON Community.

• Bills are in business and so want to make some money from their WiFi. Instead of free roaming, they get a 50% share of the money that Aliens pay to access the Community through their FON Access Point. They can also advertise their business on their personalized FON Access Point homepage.

Now about that buying; what is La Fonera?

La Fonera is FON’s own WiFi router.

A WiFi router is a product that plugs in to your broadband Internet connection, and turns it into a WiFi Access Point. That means you can connect your laptop or handheld games console to the Internet without any wires, so you can move around your house freely. More and more devices are becoming WiFi enabled! La Fonera supports the 802.11b and 802.11g standards for speeds of up to 54 Mbps.

La Fonera is a special kind of WiFi router. FON calls it a Social Router. That’s because when you activate your La Fonera, you become part of the FON Community. Members of the FON Community share their WiFi at home, and in return get free WiFi wherever they find a FON Access Point.

La Fonera is also a Social Router because you can personalize the page that other Foneros see when they log on to your FON Access Point. So you can tell people a bit about yourself or your local area, or just say ‘hi’ to your fellow Foneros.

La Fonera is only $ 29.95 because FON does a nice thing and subsidise it. (FON can afford to do this because of the money that Aliens pay to access the FON Community.) In return FON ask anybody buying La Fonera to take the Fonero Promise. This means they promise to be nice and activate their FON Social Router to share their WiFi, or to return the router to us so somebody else can share instead.

Now about that safety and security.

La Fonera offers you two wireless network signals (SSIDs), a private and a public one. The private signal is encrypted and offers you complete privacy.

The public signal will be accessible to Foneros only. This signal is the one that turns your broadband connection into a FON Access Point.

Furthermore, all Foneros connecting to the public WiFi signal within the FON Community are registered users. They need to identify themselves by a username and password.

Running an Access Point with La Fonera is not only secure but also easy to control. You can choose the amount of bandwidth you want to share.

Think about it.  What if every home and business in you town was a Fonero?  Would you find a benefit?  I know I would… I often feel guilty for keeping my wifi encrypted because I only wish to keep the bad guys out of it.  I wouldn’t mind sharing it at all with good folks, so the two signals from the La Fonera seems as if that may be an interesting solution.   With the price being $29.95… I haven’t seen a wifi router for less.

I don’t know….  What do you think?