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Bad FON!
A while back, FON was offering their small WiFi router for free. So, naturally, I signed up and got it. It came rather quickly, which was great. A few months later, I finally got around to actually trying it out. I hadn't tried earlier partly because it only has a single Ethernet port, which means it works as just a WiFi access point.
The idea behind the router is that it serves up two named networks. One is for your use, which isn't limited in bandwidth. This one also is protected with encryption and a password. I don't think you can turn this off, for the very reason that FON exists. The other named network is the public one that doesn't have encryption. However, to use it, you have to provide either a password to a web page much like public access points that require payment, or provide payment to use it.
The general idea behind FON is that lots of people will give them their network for free because by having a FON router on the network will allow you to use other FON access points for free. They don't share any of the revenue you generate, from what I can tell.
That sounds great, in theory. In practice, the router didn't work at all. At best, it would work for maybe 5 minutes and then crash. The normal behavior was to not work at all. Even when it was working, over the private side of the network I could never get results over about maybe 10-20 kilobytes per second. The route would also take up to 10 minutes to even become functional.
This was completely unacceptable. Apparently, their modified firmware is based directly on OpenWRT. However, since I run OpenWRT, I know that this is not indicative of the performance of OpenWRT. So, naturally, since I was needing something else new at the time, I got the WRT54GL, the open Linux version of the ever popular WRT54G.
Another problem with FON is that I've never actually seen another one of the APs in the wild. With my iPhone, I see a lot of APs, with probably the most common being the 2wire ones (their site claims 11 million). They have enough of them, they could probably light up a mesh network.
In any case, the experience and results were completely terrible, unfortunately. There wasn't even an updated firmware. Now I've got this near useless router sitting around back in it's box. I don't know if they can be reflashed with something better or not. What should I do with it?
Posted by Shane on August 30, 2007 8:47 AM | Permalink
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