FON up and running in Bandon
Written on November 8, 2006 by Conor O'Neill
I ordered a FON router for €17 incl P&P last week and it arrived today. If you don’t know what FON is, the basic idea is that it is a wireless router which you use to share some of your broadband bandwidth with others. You share with two types of people - other FONeros called Linuses and Bills who get access for free and Aliens who pay a small amount to FON for access. If you want to be a Bill then FON do a revenue share on that income with you. If you are a Linus then you get free wireless broadband from any other FON installation worldwide when you are travelling. I’ve signed up as a Linus and if I decide to bring my laptop to Boqueira in Cork, then I should have free broadband from Pat Phelan’s internet cafe since he has FON set up too.
This is a lovely idea which obviously only starts working really well with a certain critical mass. It takes the subsidised boxes and some early adopters to seed the thing but looking at the map of Ireland, I see some activity. There are even installs in Ballydehob and Skibbereen. There is one other location listed in Bandon (Grove Leisure Club) but the icon does not show it as active.
Setup involved plugging it into the back of our existing Linksys router and powering it up. It provides two networks - one for sharing which has no access to your own LAN and one private encrypted one for your own use. I have heard no reports of it causing any security issues.
Even tho the price is now €29.95 incl P&P but plus VAT, it is still a bargain for a wireless router and the reality for most people is that the amount of sharing they will be doing is minimal.
Technorati Tags: FON, Bandon, Ireland
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still waiting on the routers to be delivered Conor.
The tapas will just have to wait
Curiously Conor I have been running a FON router for over 6 months now and I still don’t appear on the FON map - no idea why that is.
Still, if you are ever in Rushbrook…
Swings and roundabouts. I tried several times to get one of the free ones when they were announced way back but to no avail. All my requests seemed to go into a black hole.
The mapping software needs some work. Its best guess for Bandon, Cork, Ireland was the ocean south of Madagascar!
I had to login and manually do a push pin on the map before I appeared.
Sounds like a really interesting idea and something well worth getting.
One thing I would be concerned about is the contract with your broadband supplier. I remember reading a clause in my contract that stated that I should not share my broadband with anyone outside my own residence.
So if I use a FON router, would I not be breaking my broadband contract?
You probably would be breaking the contract.
The FON guys are actively engaging with ISPs to convince them that sharing is not a bad thing and that there are possible revenue share opportunities.
If BT give me an SLA for my broadband then maybe I’ll pay a blind bit of notice to the contract.
Given that it took them a week to figure out what was wrong with broadband in Cork, what are the chances they’ll ever figure out that we are sharing our connection?
I can’t really see them ever providing an SLA to domestic supplies.
Actually, do they provide SLAs on any business accounts? If so, I wonder how much would they have had to hand over for the recent week of downtime in Munster?
I can’t image they do or they would have been pulling out all the stops to get it fixed. A downtime of a week when you are committed to an SLA could be very costly.
Yeah, I assume the response from them is “if you want an SLA, stump up for a leased line”
I think the reason for you not showing up tom is your firmware is a previous version.
If you upgrade to the newer FW you should appear on the map.
Why don’t you contact Antoin? You do know him
[...] I have written both positively and quite negatively about FON on this blog. I had no success recently with redeeming a voucher for a free router and started to wonder if it fact the reality matched the PR. [...]