FON, a community wireless system

[Tom Johnson]

My long-time friend Dan Gillmor, former technology reporter at the San Jose
Mercury-News,  writes the entry below.  I trust his intelligence and
ethics.  Is anyone familiar with FON?  Would it meet some of our needs,
especially in Santa Fe?-Tom

FON Times <http://bayosphere.com/blog/dan_gillmor/20060205/fon_times>

I met Martin Varsavsky last March at the International Summit on Democracy,
Terrorism and Security last March in Madrid, where he'd invited me to join
an Internet working group. He impressed me with his energy, vision and
genuine belief that people working together could improve the world.

Late last year, Martin, a serial entrepreneur, invited me to join the U.S.
advisory board for his new company. FON <http://en.fon.com/>, boiled down,
is a way to share Wi-Fi connections securely in a collaborative system that
could turn into a global network of inexpensive (or, depending on how one
participates) entirely free hotspots.

Today, on his blog, Martin
announced<http://english.martinvarsavsky.net/fon/a-dream-come-true.html>fairly
amazing news for a company so young:

*FON can now count Google , Skype, Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures as
investors and backers. They've joined us to help advance the FON movement,
leading a group that has put 18 million Euros into FON and also committed to
give us a strategic boost that should help us make this great idea into a
great platform for everyone who wants a faster, cheaper and more secure
wireless Internet.*

I joined the advisory board without asking whether there would be any
financial reward. (The answer, it later turned out, was that there might be,
depending on how the company did in the marketplace.) I believed in Martin
and I believed in the idea of a bottom-up (with some top-down help) network
that could have a real impact.

In particular, FON has a chance to become a vital communications link in the
developing world. That alone would make it worthwhile.

I also suspect the service could assist online community-building, anywhere,
and in ways that have not been attempted before, or have been at best
tricky. Let's just say that the potential -- in this area among others --
seems enormous.

What's the major method behind FON? Wendy Seltzer, another U.S. advisory
board member, explains it
here<http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/archives/2006/02/05/fon_scores_its_first_touchdown.html>
:

*So what's new about FON? FON aims to make it easy for non-techies to join
the wifi-sharing community too -- with FON-ready routers for sale and
user-friendly installers coming soon, with security taken into account --
and by doing that, it gives all of us more places to connect. You can join
as a "Linus," sharing wifi from your broadband connection and getting it
free elsewhere on the network; as a "Bill," sharing wifi and getting paid
for it (but paying if you want to use others' hotspots); or as an "Alien,"
paying a reasonable subscription fee to roam on the FON network.*

Keep in mind that FON is still a very young operation, and the product
itself is very much in Beta stage, a work in early progress. But things are
moving at an impressive rate.

Congratulations to Martin and his team.


--
==============================================
J. T. Johnson
Institute for Analytic Journalism
www.analyticjournalism.com
505.577.6482(c)                                 505.473.9646(h)
http://www.jtjohnson.com               tom at jtjohnson.com

"You never change things by fighting the existing reality.
To change something, build a new model that makes the
existing model obsolete."
                                                   -- Buckminster Fuller
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