This provides an interesting counterpoint to all of the media hype
surrounding FON.
Fon Is Just Another For-Fee Hotspot Operator
--------------------------------------------
By Glenn Fleishman
Special to Wi-Fi Networking News
Permanently archived item <http://wifinetnews.com/archives/
006270.html>
After cogitating on it for a couple of days and talking to other
reporters, it's pretty clear that Fon has a great smokescreen with
its free "Linus" model: The fact is, Fon is just a paid hotspot
operator that wants to eschew all venue signing, installation, and
management costs. Fon has three kinds of hotspot users, but
attention has focused on the Linuses, those who opt to let others
who are also Linuses use their hotspots for free. This will always
be a subset of all users. Let's say Fon reaches 1m installed
hotspots by 2010, one of the stated goals of the founder. If even
750,000 are "Linus" hotspots, only 750,000 people will be able to
use those hotspots at no cost. Six billion people--okay, the tens
of millions of travelers with Wi-Fi laptops or handhelds or phones--
will pay.
Let's not lose sight of the fact that there are now hundreds of
aggressive hotspot builders cherrypicking the best remaining
locations. If Fon only gets the dregs of locations (suburbs,
apartment buildings, coffeeshops without service right now), then
they're a niche-filling for-fee network. If they offer roaming
across other networks and resell to aggregators, then they become a
backfill network for missing locations, but only if people in those
locations find it worthwhile to collect small fees in exchange for
sharing bandwidth.
Primarily, Fon is for-fee. Primarily, it faces the same location,
location, location issues as other for-fee operators. Locations
that want to offer free Wi-Fi will (quote)not (end quote)install Fon.
Dana Spiegel
Executive Director
NYCwireless
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
www.NYCwireless.net
+1 917 402 0422
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