Glenn Fleishman, who had earlier expressed skepticism about FON’s prospects, reports that FON doesn’t in fact have any deal with ISP Speakeasy, something that was assumed or implied in most news reports and blog posts based on comments by FON founder Martin Varsavsky on his blog. Glenn posted this statement he received from Speakeasy spokesperson Lynn Brackpool:
No relationship, financial or otherwise, exists between Speakeasy and FON. The impression may have been created by FON because Speakeasy has always supported an open wireless sharing policy. We have contacted FON and they too understand that no implicit agreement exists between Speakeasy and them in terms of their service.
While the FON concept—which Cynthia and others reported on after the company announced a $22 million investments from the likes of Google and Skype—is an intriguing one, the clarification from Speakeasy underscores the challenges FON faces in achieving widespread acceptance in the U.S. market. Though Speakeasy and a handful of small ISPs allow re-distribution of their signal, cable and telephone companies that dominate the broadband ISP space have end user license agreements that prevent this kind of sharing.
Given the way they do business, I find it hard to believe that the dominant U.S. broadband ISPs will be attracted enough by FON’s revenue sharing scheme to work with the company. And, as Cynthia noted in her post, Glenn and others have pointed out the difficulties in creating continuous zones of FON coverage and extending service from inside one home to another, something that seems especially true in our nation’s large sprawling suburbs.
But American suburbs may not be FON’s primary targets. The one ISP it has signed up so far is Sweden’s Glocalnet, and Ethan Zuckerman, a FON advisor, makes an interesting case for FON’s relevance in Africa.
I got involved with FON…because I think FON is thinking through the hard questions necessary to help provide inexpensive wireless access around the entire world. I’ve looked closely at projects designed to build community wireless networks and have been frustrated that many of these projects seem designed explicitly for nations where bandwidth is cheap. Most let users share their bandwidth, but don’t provide a way to charge other users for using that bandwidth, or to “throttle back” users who clog your pipe downloading films from Limewire…
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…
…Most of my African friends are entrepreneurs, either on a micro- or macro-scale. They’ll understand the idea of buying access to a scarce resource (a broadband net connection) and selling access to that for an affordable price faster than most Americans and Europeans will. I suspect FON will make a great deal of sense in many developing nations.
The more densely populated and economically less-developed areas of this country also appear to be on FON’s priority list. In a post entitled Barrio FON, Varsavsky said:
Ejovi and I are working on a project at FON that we both care very much about and that is the idea of bridging the digital divide in Harlem. As opposed to the municipal wifi network projects which are great but expensive, FON’s approach is to get donors including my foundation who started Educ.ar and Educar Chile, to contribute free routers for the people of Harlem who will place them by their windows and make Harlem a wifi neighborhood. In order to make the project sustainable, Harlem residents would get free wifi username and passwords but visitors would pay for WiFi access. We have been studying the availability of broadband in Harlem and even though there are not as many internet connections in Harlem than further downtown there are enough to build a wifi neighborhood. FON installs only need 2 to 4 foneros per block to give good coverage.
Update: If I’m understanding it correctly, it seems FON’s plans for Harlem would still require cooperation from the ISPs that provide the 2-4 Fonero connections per block needed to build the envisioned WiFi neighborhood.
In another post, Varsavsky discussed “community building” as a key FON benefit, not only for local community members, but arguably also for ISPs:
In March FON will launch a software upgrade what will allow foneros around the world to build neighborhood LANs or a parallel internet we call the INTERFON. Basically what will happen is that our software will enable routers to seek each other out and if they find they can build direct links between them they will avoiding the regular internet altogether and sending packets through the interfon. This is great for neighbors who want to communicate very fast. For example one neighbor just returned from a trip to Africa and has 100 megs of pictures to send out, with direct wifi connectivity at 54 megs sending them is a breeze. So they connect directly, not through the internet but through the interfon…
…What FON is doing is creating a congregation of neighbors who can communicate in better ways…Build a FON congregation means get your neighbors to download our software and communicate with them directly in a more private, secure, certainly faster way than through the internet. ISPs by the way, would love this cause their clients still pay (if not they can’t be foneros) but they take the heaviest traffic off their networks. At these congregations foneros can play games, exchange files (those that are legal to exchange), videoconference, and whatever activities they may want to do inside the congregation. They can of course also communicate with the rest of the world…but inside the congregation the communication is more natural, faster, meaningful.
Mitch Shapiro at 1:57 AM|Comments(1)
If they join hands and convince companies in wi-fi and wimax infrastructure to act as a FONero, then they might succeed.
Posted by: patil at February 8, 2006 5:47 AM
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