{"id":199,"date":"2006-02-05T22:26:45","date_gmt":"2006-02-06T03:26:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/index.php\/2006\/02\/05\/fon-sounds-great-but-will-it-work\/"},"modified":"2006-02-05T22:26:45","modified_gmt":"2006-02-06T03:26:45","slug":"fon-sounds-great-but-will-it-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/02\/05\/fon-sounds-great-but-will-it-work\/","title":{"rendered":"FON sounds great, but will it work?"},"content":{"rendered":"

It’s nice to hear that FON, the share-your-Wi-Fi network founded by entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, has gotten an investment from Google,<\/a> along with Skype founders Niklas Zenstrom and Janus Friis – but while that is a huge vote of confidence, it doesn’t remove some of the uncertainties surrounding the FON business model. For one thing, as more than one person has mentioned (including in the comments<\/a> on Scoble’s post) almost every major ISP specifies in their contracts that this kind of wide-open sharing isn’t allowed.<\/p>\n

According to comments Martin sent to Om, the company is trying to bring ISPs on-side, but has so far only managed to strike a deal with Speakeasy<\/a> (Update: According to Om, Speakeasy says it has no arrangement<\/a> with FON)<\/b>. Alec Saunders of Iotum says that most ISPs don’t enforce these agreements<\/a>, and that’s true – but they might decide to change their minds about that if they find widespread sharing of the type FON has in mind.<\/p>\n

Glenn Fleishmann of Wi-Fi Networking News, who has been a major skeptic on FON, says the investment by Google and the Skype gang (as well as Index Partners, which made a bundle on its investment in Skype) makes him a little less skeptical, but he still has concerns<\/a> – including the difficulty of getting ISPs on-side, but also the difficulty of building out a robust enough wireless network to make what the company has in mind actually feasible. <\/p>\n

Not only that, but how many people are going to feel the same concerns over security that the commenter on Scoble’s post<\/a> feels? FON has a response here<\/a>, but that might not satisfy enough people to open up their networks – especially after everyone has been telling them to lock them down so no one piggy-backs on them. FON has a response to the ISP question<\/a> too, but that amounts to trying to convince the ISPs they will share revenue with them (assuming there is any). Like my friend Rob Hyndman, I think many providers (particularly in Canada) would be skeptical<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It’s nice to hear that FON, the share-your-Wi-Fi network founded by entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky, has gotten an investment from Google, along with Skype founders Niklas Zenstrom and Janus Friis – but while that is a huge vote of confidence, it doesn’t remove some of the uncertainties surrounding the FON business model. For one thing, as … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “FON sounds great, but will it work?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}