2009 14
Unveiling the Fonera 2.0n!
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
Last night at the Village Pub in Silicon Valley (Woodside, CA), we launched the Fonera 2.0n WiFi router – available for sale in Europe (€79) on September 15th and in the US ($99) on October 15th. The Fonera 2.0n is similar to the Fonera 2.0g but has a much more powerful processor and is built around the 802.11n standard which means that it has greater range, bandwidth and speed than its predecessor. The launch was attended by 30 of the most important bloggers, Twitterers and news organizations in the world, including The New York Times and The Economist.
Thanks to Loic Le Meur and Geraldine who organised a great event.
Here is the full press release.
Here are the first articles from CrunchGear and Bub.blicio.us..
A few pictures below. You can also see nice pics of the dinner @briansolis
The attendees:
Martin Varsavsky + Nina Wiegand – FON
Loic Le Meur + Geraldine Le Meur – Seesmic
Bernardo Hernandez – Google
Michael Arrington – TechCrunch
Seth Sternberg – Meebo
Gabe Rivera – TechMeme
Dave McLure – Founders Fund
Jeremiah Owyang – Forrester
Brian Solis – Future Works
Joanna Rees – VSPCapital + John Hamm
Ariel Pohler – Textmarks
Jeff Clavier – SoftTechVC + Babette Clavier
Dave Morin – Facebook
Brittany Bohnet – Google
Randi Zuckerberg – Facebook
Louis Gray – louisgray.com
Jack Dorsey – Twitter
Jennifer Leggio – ZDNet
Robert Scoble – RackSpace
Erik Lammerding – Apple
Paul Boutin – New York Times
Troy Wolverton – San Jose Mercury News
Martin Giles – The Economist
ijustine – Twitter star
@veronica – another Twitter star
Follow Martin Varsavsky on Twitter: twitter.com/martinvars
No Comments
Jordi - FON on July 14, 2009 ·
Hi Matthias! here you go the ports: 1 x WAN, 4 x 100Mb LAN, 1 x USB 2.0 and regarding the WiFi SoC its the Ralink 3052 for 802.11n running our OpenWRT based Firmware.
Charbax on July 14, 2009 ·
I like the part “Fonera 2.0n is similar to the Fonera 2.0g but has a much more powerful processor”, does that mean one can download and seed more than 2 BitTorrent files at the same time?
The main problem I have replacing my x86 Ubuntu server with Fonera 2.0, is that the processor inside only support 2 BitTorrent sessions at the same time. I’d really like not to have a limit on that.
Also, does it process local media server file sharing much faster? Can we hope that it can perform pretty decently compared to the industry’s most powerful x86t based NAS boxes (such as whatever Qnap and Synology), can we perhaps consider using a Fonera 2.0n to actually do Terrabytes of local backups and other types of local and Internet based large backup file management?
Jordi - FON on July 14, 2009 ·
@Charbax, YES, Fonera 2.0 n can download more than 2 BitTorrent files at a time 😉 Fonera 2.0 n has double the RAM (64Mb vs 32Mb) and its embedded processor on the SoC runs at 300Mhz instead of 180Mhz and on a more efficient architecture so, YES again, you can feel the difference from Fonera 2.0 and Fonera 2.0 n. But it is NOT comparable to the industries most powerful x86 processors, those are more powerful and usually come on much more expensive devices like Media Centers that usually run heavier Operating Systems like XPs or OSX. You can definitely use the Fonera 2.0 n to do Terabytes of local backups and Internet based large backup file management.
Charbax on July 14, 2009 ·
OK this sounds great! If we can have 6 – 8 or even 10 BitTorrents working on it at the same time, I would say that would be perfect. Then it would make no more sense runing a computer to do ones downloading work. If you implement this correctly, you could perhaps suddently become one of the greatest users of BitTorrent technology, I’m thinking for automatically downloading HD video shows using BitTorrent and RSS technology (could even be legally once TV production companies figure out they can save money on bandwidth and higher the quality by using BitTorrent and RSS to distribute their shows in HD quality to an unlimited amount of viewers).
Then for the local network attached storage bandwidth and performance, I’d probably be dreaming to hope that this generation can do upwards Gigabit LAN transfer speeds. But if you can now do closer to 100mbit/s LAN effective speeds rather than the well below 10mbit/s speeds of Fonera 2.0, then I would guess this should definitely be a pretty reliable way to synchronize ones multi-terrabytes of personal file backups. Terrabyte hard drives are now below $100, your box could be the best way to make some sense and good use out of those. Cloud storage will be great, but local hard drives are so cheap, it wouldn’t make sense not to synchronize a local copy of all ones personal backups of files as well.
Jordi - FON on July 14, 2009 ·
@Charbax, totally agree with you, even online backups are indeed a new trend for backup services, I still have my couple of cheap Tb HDDs with all my family notebooks and phones automated data backups. This new Fonera2.0n will indeed amaze with its performance, BT downloads do not even affect other applications running on the background, data transfers are close to the top rates you can get on the current 11n Draft.
Dave McClure on July 15, 2009 ·
Martin –
thanks for a wonderful dinner and an interesting product demo! the new Fonera looks cool… wish you the best of luck with the launch 🙂
– dave mcclure
founders fund
veronica belmont on July 15, 2009 ·
Thanks again for a great evening, looking forward to taking a closer look at the Fonera in the future!
Best,
Veronica Belmont, Revision3
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Matthias on July 14, 2009 ·
Hello Martin,
can you already say something about the technical specifications?
Would be interesting to know:
* How many LAN ports the device will provide
* How many USB ports the device will provide
* If the LAN ports will support 1000/100 Mbit (Gbit would re really nice!)
* Does the Wi-Fi support dual band (2,4 and 5Ghz)
* …
Thank you
Matthias