This is Fred, a fellow Taiwanese blogger of great people like Chiao and Schee. Sorry I was unable to attend your Taipei appearance since I was going to have a minor surgical operation the next day.

Fon is a very interesting idea/business initiative/infrastructure. I can’t wait to see how it works here, and definite I will be a part of it. Since I work as a marketing consultant specializing in the local ITindustry/user experience, I may offer some relevant help if needed.

Anyway, good luck!

You seem to be rapidly expanding in the region, so…when is Fon gonna be launched in Hong Kong???

What is a girl sport? Badminton?

Don’t know if there’s FON baseball fan, in fact in the US, Japan, Taiwan, in a baseball stadium, half man, 1/4 women, and the rest are kids and teens.

If you’ve been to any computer-related trade shows in Asia Pac, you’d see lots of girls…show girls to promote gadgets. I know it’s a bad business nature here, but it works from time to time. And this is why I talked about FON girls the other day. No offense!

That’s a good point; we already considered this, but for now, it’s been delayed temporarily.

For those who don’t know what IP6 (or IPv6, IP version 6) is: right now, Internet communication is based on a numbering system, similar to the telephony numbers. Every let’s say router, has a ‘telephone number’, known as IP address. But, if you have many network devices (PC, laptop, network printer, videconsoles…) connected to the router, you can’t reach them directly from outside your house… you need something similar to the extensions in the telephony system. You call the ‘known’ telephone number and then add an extension to it. This is the way currently Internet works, this is Internet Protocol version 4, also known as IP4 and IPv4.

This problem is going to be solved in the next release of the protocol: IP6 (not IP5!!!). With IP6, every network device will have a uniwue worldwide number (IP6 address). It will be related to the MAC address of the device, which is theoretically unique right now.

What does this mean? That we will be able to connect any device of ours, anywhere in the world and it will be accessible also from anywhere. The devices will need no network configuration anymore, and many other cool features willcome up.

Additionally, IP4 was designed to transfer only HTML static pages and data that requires no real time transmision (video streaming – tv, conference calls, audio, radios etc.), like document and file transfers. But now, with the multimedia revolution in the Internet, there’s a big need of coping this traffic which requires very a special treatment. IP6 will solve that as well as improve security and scalability. Public and Private IPs will disappear forever.

But this is something that needs to be implemented, and the most important part is that the ISPs and carriers do it. Currently it’s only used in experimental scenarios and some university campuses and intranets in some corporations. FON could do some kind of work around like that with tunnels and creating a FON IP6 network, but the bennefits it would nowadays bring to the FON Comunity is far from being interesting enough. There are some other features that will make the user enjoy FON much more than that right now.

I personally believe IP6 will start to be worth once the carriers and ISPs start to implement it… but this move requires lots of migratoin planning.

Regards

Thinking of something with more consumer appeal, the router could provide access to a USB-connected webcam for home surveillance, and possibly other gadgets to control home appliances such as heating.