Fon in Less Developed Countries

While the prices of goods manufactured in less developed countries vary from country to country depending on income, currency strength, natural resources, the prices of internet access and internet equipment are pretty standard around the world. Surprisingly, they are higher in less developed countries where income is much lower. While in America the GDP per capita is $36K per year and the annual cost of an internet connection around $360 or 1% of that in Argentina the annual cost of broadband is around $480 and the annual GDP per capita around $4000 or 12%. Taking this into consideration FON has developed a different model for Less Developed Countries that relies on clusters of people sharing a broadband connection through WiFi. While in Europe, Japan and United States FON´s motto is share broadband at home have broadband everywhere in Argentina for example our motto will be, team up with your neighbors to share bandwidth…through wifi. In order for broadband to have a similar impact on people´s budget the sharing will have to be on an approximate 10:1 ratio. Initially ISPs may be against our model but we will probably prevail when they see that we will work with them, deploy our model in low income neighborhoods and the result will be that more connections are sold. Moreover users will see more value as they will be able to roam from cluster to cluster and will be more likely to pay. In some way we will implement something akin to Grameen Phone but for WiFi.