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Fon is planning to announce on Monday, that they will hand out ONE cool million FON wi-fi routers at a cost of $5 / 5 €, to help democratize the wireless generation.
Indeed as I was travelling in the US last week, I felt the need for such a service at last! I have an Orange flat data rate account, that theoretically allows me to connect everywhere in France, and I discovered last week, also has a numebr of romaing agreements in the US when I tried to connect to hotspots (shame on me, I left my password back home...).
Nevertheless, whenever I poped open my laptop, I would at least half a dozen wifi networks available for connection, but all protected by WEP/WPA keys.
Wouldn't it have been great if I could have connected to at least one of them with my FON account ? Benefit from true Wi-Fi roaming ? In NYC the other day, I was trying to download my email on my new Nokia N91 phone (it does Wifi !!!). Most networks were closed, and every now and then in town, I could connect and download the stuff.
Although the economics are somewhat complicated between who gets what (the carriers, the wifi providers, the users), it is a public service to have a service such as FON around. Now anyone of the big operators would launch a similar service; well do it. FON is at the moment the only service out there aiming at making wifi connectivity easy. Let's help him, and grab routers at $5 !
For more information, check Martin's blog.
(disclosure: FON's founder & CEO is an investor in my company).
