As I’ve recently disclosed, our main objective at FON is the launch of our next product, the Fonera 2.0. The Fonera 2.0 is a Fonera that will not only make it easy to provide WiFi for yourself and for your neighbors, it will also provide Foneros with great features like the ability to connect a hard drive to it and autonomously upload or download content from the Internet while you’re doing something else on your laptop or your PC is off. In short the Fonera 2.0 will manage your daily relationship with the Web 2.0 doing such thing as sending your pictures to Flickr, your videos to Youtube, downloading your torrents, etc. Many of the things that the new Fonera will do a PC can do of course but why tie up a thousand dollar investment with your vital info doing menial task when you can have a $49 Fonera do them.
The Fonera 2.0 will be an open platform for developers to build their applications on top of, much like a hacked iPhone is now. An open platform is nothing without a community of developers, so we’re announcing today the launch of The Fonosfera, our development community program that will span not only the Fonera 2.0 but all Fon products. We know there are already many communities doing great things with our Foneras, adding new features and fixing bugs. The idea behind the Fonosfera is to bring all the development work the communities have been doing and will do in the future to any Fon user.
The Fonosfera will be a chance for all these communities to keep working independently, while contributing to the development of Fon products including the Fonera 2.0 and the applications that will run on it. The Fonosfera will provide a space for gathering and sharing between developers and to make their projects available to end users all around the world. It will include a framework with development and community tools such as svn, trac, forums, mailing list, wiki etc. We already picked a few communities that have proved they can do great things with the Fonera and sent them a test version of our Fonera 2.0.
The Fonera 2.0 will provide a USB connection and users will be able to plug any sort of USB device to it (as long as there’s software support in the firmware, and we invite developers to add support for any device they might think of). The Fonera 2.0 will provide out of the box the ability to connect a hard drive or pendrive to it, so you can access it on your local network and use it to store the contents your Fonera 2.0 will download from the Internet for you. Another interesting feature we are working on is the ability to connect an HSDPA modem to the USB port of the Fonera 2.0, to share an HSDPA connection on the move or where DSL is not available.
We are working hard to make the Fonera 2.0 as open as possible, and we are willing to take all the help the development community can bring to Fon and Foneros. Our users will still have to wait a few months to get their Foneras 2.0, but we’re sure it will be worth the wait.
Follow Martin Varsavsky on Twitter: twitter.com/martinvars
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RHarmsen on April 13, 2008 ·
Is there any way to get into this developers community!?
I have some great ideas for connecting USB hardware to it.
Paul RODTS on April 13, 2008 ·
The news about the The Fonera 2.0 came just in time; I almost bought me a Myka….Viva Martin…
http://www.myka.tv/
Ricardo on April 13, 2008 ·
Martin, will Fonosfera be a public place, or will it be “members only” by invitation of Fon?
Why can this community not be based in Fon’s existing Discussion Boards?
Will file downloading and uploading be only for the Fonero, or can Aliens use this too?
Will the “open development platform” incude root access to the La Fonera 2, or will this be some kind of process where modules are given to Fon for approval?
As you may have learned, feature development for La Foneras does not depend on a USB port. Will previous router models be “opened”, or just this new model?
Paulo Silva aka PJMDS on April 14, 2008 ·
Great news, now a few questions:
1) Will FON send La Fonera 2.0 to beta testers ? if yes when ?
2) What are the hardware specifications of La Fonera 2.0 ?
Best Regards
Enrique Burgos on April 14, 2008 ·
Martin, great news…
Only for foneros?cost? new fonera or only software upgrade….
Someday qe have to talk about fon & marketing…share ideas…
yuri ilyin on April 14, 2008 ·
Greetings, mr. Varsavski.
Can you, please, tell, is Fonosfera going to be available to Russian developers as well as soon the service itself is launched? Thank you!
Miroslav on April 14, 2008 ·
It would be an idea, if Lafonera 2.0 works as a print server.
In the case of these 700 Canal kiosk video boards, printers could be installed inside so that the foneros could be able to print up to 5 pages (online tickets, online hotel bookingsetc). It would also be nice for the kiosk operating company, since the foneros would have to stay just infront of it and watch the commercials, till their documents are printed.
Before 7 years, I made, probably the first fully operational CAR PC in Europe (http://mirox3m.carstereo.com), nowadays such Carputers are something normal. So its us who build the future, not somebody else, neither sone Company! Join FONosfera!
Martin Varsavsky on April 14, 2008 ·
Paul,
Interesting, I didn´t know about the Myka. I will definitely test it, but the fonera 2.0 should do the same and cost much less.
Ciccio on April 18, 2008 ·
Hi all, Fonera 2.0 and Fonosfera news are very exciting for all FON enthusiasts like me!
I think that a very useful idea for the new Fonera is HSDPA/HSUPA USB modem compatibility, especially for mobile internet users or for ones that can’t get DSL.
Maybe that with more than just 1 usb connection (a second one 4storage, for example) we could get a full mobile internet sharing wifi device.
I’d like to know how do i can contribute to develop this feature as a software developer.
Thanks a lot!
Martin on April 18, 2008 ·
Hola Martin,
I had an idea after reading about all this, and it’s to Fon a cultural center near my area:
http://en.fasani.org/241
If you think it’s Ok, please send me two foneras, and I will buy the Fontennas and mount the whole thing.
Best regards,
martin @ oysms.com
Paul RODTS on April 19, 2008 ·
Good idea Ciccio – Adding a 3G/modem would work fine and fast, if you are not to far away from the 3G base station…Could be a nice and useful back-up connection…
Jordi - FON on April 21, 2008 ·
Ricardo, yes, the Fonosfera is designed to be a public place but developers need to be endorsed or associated to any of the Open Source communities already working on router apps. We relay on the selection process that Open Source communities already have in place for developers to join. If there are some individuals that do not want to be associated with any Open Source community but just want to do their own apps independently, they will also be able to join but as individuals. Current Discussion Board will be of great help but we also want the communities to keep their freedom to manage their boards for their developments. Downloading and Uploading apps will be open for everybody to install in their Foneras 2.0. Yes users will be able to have root access to this new Foneras, but before opening will be alerted that opening some of the services could compromise their network security because this is only intended for developers. Feature development does not depend on the USB but you will agree that a USB opens the door for a huge number of new apps in very diverse fields, communities have been requesting this USB port since very long ago because of the great number of new USB devices that could now be controlled by Fonera 2.0. This is the first model to be open to all communities, we expect this to be just the first Open Fonera and strongly believe with this unit we will probe a model of Open cooperation that will report in more choices for Foneros worldwide. We are also creating a simple framework so Foneros with little expertise in WiFi routers can have applications installed into their Foneras just one click away.
Jordi – FON
Jordi - FON on April 21, 2008 ·
Yuri, of course, several developers programming and supporting the most prestigious Open Source projects in the planet are from Russia!
Jordi – FON
Jordi - FON on April 21, 2008 ·
Enrique, its a New Fonera with USB port to connect HDDs and all kinds of USB devices. We open the hardware to the Open Source Communities so there are more apps out there available for Foneros.
Jordi – FON
Jack on April 22, 2008 ·
The only doubt I have concerns the speed of the Atheros CPU you will use and the amount of flash & ram. You need at least 16MB of internal flash, to alleviate passing programs through the bus of an external usb flash or a modded serial flash card. Also RAM, I tried running torrents on an ASUS router with 32MB, it was un-usable. Upgraded to a NAS w/ 64MB of ram + 266MHz CPU, will only allow at most 2 torrents to simultaneously d/l. Adding 3-4 caused all torrents to slow to a crawl or as soon as NAS usage occurs. Swapping/virtual RAM across USB bus will definitely wear out the HDD rather quickly.
Please provide suitable flash & ram space.
jln on May 5, 2008 ·
This is probably a very clever thing business-wise… and about time ! Nabaztag, watch out !
We are doing an “hack your (unused) Fonera” workshop in two weeks — as Martin said in a previous post there is 200.000 unused foneras out there. We expect to make the little boxes do wonders (write SSID poems, connect with arduino, act as a walking router, make sounds…)
Hacking the fonera have been seen as anti-fon by Fon for quite some time. But myself I’d rather hack and extend my (active) fonera without loosing the fon functionnality.
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Pablo on April 13, 2008 ·
Those are great features, but I guess people wouldn’t want to share HSDPA with other foneros as you can get ripped off from Telefonica or whatever. In that case, we should be able to chose wether we want to share wifi, or just use it for ourselves… because most of the times you have a giga limit for a month to download or something like that.