People who are interested in sharing excess bandwidth at home or work and obtaining bandwidth elsewhere have found in FON the right free wifi roaming platform and are downloading our software. But is FON doable? How many broadband connections do we need for FON to provide reliable wifi signal around the world? Surprisingly not that many. Nowadays the largest hotspot networks, T Mobile, Boingo, The Cloud, Orange, Vodafone, have fewer than 20,000 hotspots each. FON just launched and we have had over 1000 downloads in a week. That is 5% of the largest wifi hotspot networks. Skype to give an example of a much more established platform has around 150,000 downloads per day for a total so far of 200 million according to their site. But while FON is more complicated than Skype to download many less foneros are needed for FON to give a great wifi experience than skyperos to give Skype a great user experience. For Skype to succeed millions of people need to be on Skype. But one fonero can give coverage to half a city block and that is equivalent to thousands of people who live or pass by. Our estimates are that 1 million foneros around the world or around 1% of the people would be enough to give a global wifi signal. An ambitious but reachable goal.

Here´s a list of many routers. The key about FON is that it work on wifi routers that are LINUX based. In this link you find more information. That a router may work with FON does not mean that it works with the current download. FON is a new company and we launched with only Linksys Linux enabled routers. But it is our objective to go through the list of the most popular Linux enabled routers and have them available to foneros around the world.

As I prepare to attend Les Blogs in Paris next Monday and launch FON in France, I read the wonderful news that France has acted and fined its three mobile operators the astonishing amount of 534 million euros.

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