Have Fon

In early February, the Spain-based company Fon (en.fon.com) was three months old and had just three thousand "foneros" when founder Martin Varsavsky announced a $21.7 million investment from Skype, Google and Sequoia Capital.

If all those companies have their way, everybody in a position to use or deploy Wi-Fi Net connections will be a breed of "Fonero". Varavsky explains, "To us the world is divided into Linus, Bills and Aliens. A Linus shares his/her bandwidth for free with other Foneros, Bills share their bandwidth for a small fee, and Aliens don't share their bandwidth at all." Because Aliens are those creatures called "customers".

And those needn't just be geeks like the readers of Linux Journal. Ethan Zuckerman, in his blog My Heart's in Accra, explains why he's both a Fonero and on the company's advisory board:

There’s a philosophical bias to many of these projects - a belief that Internet access is an inalienable right and should be free - that I find charming, but totally impractical for the parts of the world I’m most concerned about.

In Africa, bandwidth isn’t cheap. Entire universities run on less bandwidth than I have coming into my house on a DSL line. Being altruistic and leaving your wireless access point open in Africa is pretty much a guarantee that you’re going to end up with other users abusing the limited bandwidth you have. It’s important that African users have the opportunity to share their bandwith in a way that allows for “bandwidth shaping” - sharing some bandwidth with other users and retaining the rest for your own needs - and billing, so other users can share the cost with you. FON’s current software isn’t optimized for this situation yet, but it’s close, and FON is engaged with the issues in a serious and sustained way. I predict that FON is something I’ll be able to enthusastically pitch to African friends in the very near future.

To run Fon, you download software based on Sebastian Gostchall's DD-WRT open source project (www.dd-wrt.org). And you run it on a Fon-compatible router. Right now that's a Linksys WRT54G/GS/GL (versions 1x to 4x), which are the ones with Linux inside. The first 3,000 are being sold far below cost. Those may be gone by the time you read this, but the company is sure to make it as easy as possible to become a Linus, if not a Bill.

- Doc Searls