According to this PC Energy report, US organizations alone waste $2.8 billion every year powering 108 million unused PCs, responsible for approximately 20 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions, roughly equivalent to the emissions of 4 million cars. PCs and monitors are 39% of total ICT emissions worldwide (that account to 2% of the total emissions), equivalent, according to the PC Energy report, to a full year of CO2 emissions from approximately 43.9 million cars. If all the world’s 1 billion PC’s were powered down for just one night, says the PC Energy report, it would save enough energy to light up New York City’s Empire State Building for more than 30 years.

There’s a very simple action anybody can take to reduce emissions and cut energy costs: turn your PC off at night or when it’s not being used. Our Fonera 2.0 can be really helpful for this purpose: if you usually keep your PC on all night to download/upload content from the Net, the Fonera 2.0 can take care of downloading files from BitTorrent, Megaupload and Rapidshare and uploading your pictures and videos to Flickr, Picasa and Youtube, letting you turn off your PC at night, thus significantly reducing your energy consumption and CO2 emissions. If you believe turning your computer off and on every day will somehow damage it, or won’t help you reduce your energy comsumption, read this article from Microsoft.

But how much money can you save? Say you keep a desktop PC, consuming around 100 W, powered up day and night to download content from the Net. If the average price in Europe for a kilowatt hour is €0,18, your PC will cost you around €157 per year. Using a Fonera 2.0 you could keep your PC on for only 10 hours a day, and the Fonera will do the downloading/uploading for you during the night, using only around 3 watts. You’ll save €89 in one year and pay back the €49 investment to buy your Fonera 2.0 in less then 7 months. Furthermore, every year you’ll avoid producing 355 kilograms of CO2. Your PC left on day and night would otherwise emit 629 kg of CO2 in one year, equivalent to driving a BMW X3 SUV for 3600km. Turning your PC off at night and using your Fonera 2.0 for downloading will bring your CO2 emissions down to 273kg per year.

Below is a comparison table listing features and prices of the Fonera 2.0 and its closest competitors. Companies like ASUS, Planex, D-Link, Belkin and Linksys all sell wireless routers with USB ports and storage features, but none of these provides the same functionality  as the Fonera 2.0 and none can match its 49€ price. This makes the Fonera 2.0 the best deal on the market if you are looking for a smart router that not only gives you wifi, but also allows you to share hard drives, printers and webcams in your network and delegate your downloading and uploading activities to an inexpensive tiny router, letting you keep your PC off while downloading at night, helping you save money and reduce carbon emissions.

The closest competitors for the Fonera 2.0 are WiFi routers from Planex and ASUS that let you download files from BitTorrent to a USB hard drive and share a printer on your network. Both lack most of the Fonera 2.0’s features, like Youtube, Flickr and Picasa uploaders, out-of-the-box support for 3G modems and the Megaupload and Rapidshare downloaders. Both ASUS and Planex products let you stream your files to iTunes equipped PCs or media devices and we’ll soon release the same iTunes server functionality for the Fonera 2.0. On top of that, the Fonera 2.0, like a normal Fonera, lets you  share some of your bandwidth at home, make some money with your WiFi connection and roam the world for free. This unique feature is not available in any other router. The Fonera continues to be the only social router in the world.

Planex BitTorrent routers are hard to find in Europe or the US (or at least I couldn’t find recent pricing information for them), while the ASUS WL-500g Premium and its bigger brother, the WL-700 (equipped with a 250GB drive), cost respectively around 100€ and 220€. The other routers in the table provide only basic file sharing features and nonetheless all cost more then our Fonera 2.0. The Belkin N+ router and D-Link DIR-855 offer greater coverage thanks to the 802.11n standard, that the Fonera 2.0 (which is 802.11g) can beat using our Fontennas. We decided to keep the price of the Fonera low by not including a hard drive as there are 1 tera HDD now for only 99 euros. The Fonera works best with a USB 2.0 hub so you can combine pen drives, hard drives, web cams, 3G dongles, or whatever USB device you fancy.

Besides being an exciting gadget, the Fonera 2.0 helps you reduce some of the CO2 you generate in your digital life. The Fonera 2.0 is Green because you can save energy moving your long time consuming tasks from your notebook or desktop to your Fonera 2.0 router, allowing you to shut down your computer while Fonera 2.0 does the uploading and downloading.

When we leave our computers on at night, doing long uploads of our videos to YouTube, or downloading huge files with BitTorrent, our notebook or desktop cannot go to standby mode and wastes from 10 to 100W of electricity – 10W is what we would consume with a very energy efficient notebook with its screen off, and 100W is with a not-so-efficient Core Duo desktop PC using a screen saver with the monitor on. And multiply all this for an entire night, for as many nights as we leave it on!

With the new Fonera 2.0 executing all these uploading/downloading tasks, and with a USB HDD attached to it, you will only consume from 2.95W to 3.85W (depending on HDD model).

This means that, in the worst case scenario, you will reduce to 1/3rd the CO2 emissions that our uploading/downloading generates and if you are replacing an average desktop PC, CO2 emissions using the Fonera 2.0 will be reduced up to 30 times.

So, all of us at FON that have been developing this piece of equipment for quite a while, feel happy that this social router that manages your relationship with the web 2.0 is also greener than any alternative to upload and downlaod.