FON and the City

There are many municipal Wi Fi projects around the world. These projects involve getting weather proof Wi Fi hotspots and installing them around the cities. At FON we believe that the best solution for a city is not a pure hotspot solution. Instead we believe that the best solution is citizens of a city with FON routers by a window combined with some hotspot investments on behalf of the city in key locations. We have been talking already to a number of cities whose names unfortunately we cannot yet disclosed and the reception has been great. The key here is that behind the municipal wifi movement there´s a war going on with the telecom operators on one side and the cities on the other. But with FON both cities and telecom operators win. Cities win because residents put their routers by their windows and provide free roaming to each other only after PAYING the telecom operators. And operators win because they get more customers and because they make more revenues as non residents pay to use the networks. FON then is either a free network for residents and a paid network for non residents. But the prices for non residents or aliens like we call them, coming at $2 a day, are very, very reasonable. $2 per day is a price that is not low enough to encourage you not to sign up with a telecom operator if you are a resident (as bandwidth costs less than $60 per month) but it is low enough for visitors into a city to feel that if they want wifi they can get it everywhere for a very reasonable amount.