BT FON wins the Most Innovative Wireless Broadband Company award

Congrats Martin & FON/BT !

Proficiat, Congratulations, Enhorabuena, Congratulazioni,……
¡¡¡FeLiCiTaCiOnEs Martin!!!

¡¡¡FeLiCiTaCiOnEs Martin!!!

Martin I just read the NYT arcticle on you and the FON company, and must tell you, the only way the FON network get to grow is giving their users something more than free Internet access when traveling. I would love to share my 8 Mbps WiFi connection in exchange of something, however I live just a few meters from a very busy business Hotel and I don´t feel the trade will be fare, the Foneros at the Hotel will probably use a lot of my bandwidth and will never be able to get my fare share back, specially because I rarely travel. However if FON offers me something more in exchange, like money, air miles, free gizmos, or even a T-Shirt I would reconsider it. In my opinion the best partner you can get right now is me, Richard Branson and some Virgin Atlantic miles for the heavily unbalanced FON hot spot providers. Cheers !

Macedo, when I read this posting and when I talk with people that disconnected their fonera, I am sure that not many foneros are aware that they can limit the amount of MB’s that they want to share…
Maybe FON must communicate this tool to limit the monthly sharings, more clearly…
( f.e. I share only 512 MB/month because I only have 2GB/month from my Belgian provider )

Hi Paul, I am aware that you can limit the bandwidth on the FON router, and I have plenty of it to share. However many ISP also impose a monthly traffic quota, in my case it is 40 GB, after that I will have to pay for every extra in/out GB. I know I can squeeze the shared bandwidth to never get that far, however my point is: many of potential FON providers barely travel or need out of home WiFi connection, so why bother using Fonera ? “FON Miles” could be the answer…they could be redeemed in out of home WiFi access or anything else FON can manage to get…even discounted air tickets. Until that I will not join the Network…and I am not alone.

Hi Macedo, thanks for the reply. I live in a bad weather country (Belgium) and I don’t see many people using their laptops in our rainy streets… So if you don’t travel, maybe you could start using a Wi-Fi phone in combination with FON. If you are in a big city like Brussels, after a while you learn to know the location of most of the FON hotspots in your working area.

So in my case and since about a year, I only make gsm-phone calls when it’s urgent.. I make 95 % of my calls with my SMC Wi-Fi phone (I carry extra batteries) via Skype Call Out or Skype Regular… I don’t have a regular phone at home anymore and with a yearly budget of about 150 euro, I am on the (Wi-Fi) phone for about 4 hours a day (of which minimum 30 minutes daily calls to my friends in Italy).

It’s like power to the people if we want…. with a fonera on every street block, we could construct our own very cheap telephone company with mostly free calls and as practical as using gsm…Greetz to you…