While the prices of goods manufactured in less developed countries vary from country to country depending on income, currency strength, natural resources, the prices of internet access and internet equipment are pretty standard around the world. Surprisingly, they are higher in less developed countries where income is much lower. While in America the GDP per capita is $36K per year and the annual cost of an internet connection around $360 or 1% of that in Argentina the annual cost of broadband is around $480 and the annual GDP per capita around $4000 or 12%. Taking this into consideration FON has developed a different model for Less Developed Countries that relies on clusters of people sharing a broadband connection through WiFi. While in Europe, Japan and United States FON´s motto is share broadband at home have broadband everywhere in Argentina for example our motto will be, team up with your neighbors to share bandwidth…through wifi. In order for broadband to have a similar impact on people´s budget the sharing will have to be on an approximate 10:1 ratio. Initially ISPs may be against our model but we will probably prevail when they see that we will work with them, deploy our model in low income neighborhoods and the result will be that more connections are sold. Moreover users will see more value as they will be able to roam from cluster to cluster and will be more likely to pay. In some way we will implement something akin to Grameen Phone but for WiFi.

Martin, THE Martin, had a dream. His dream was about all people being judged not by the color of their skin but their content of their soul. His dream was about access to a life of equal opportunity. I, Martin, an admirer of Martin Luther King, also have a dream. It relates to a newer form of discrimination: access to information, to a competitive education, or in short access to the internet. For 5 years now at projects like Educ.ar, Educar Chile where millions of children were given first time access to the internet we have been working at making access to the educational resources on the internet not a privileged but a right. FON while a company and not an NGO, represents the continuation of my dream: people sharing wifi to provide internet access everywhere. When I look at the United States, the country where I was educated and lived for 18 years I imagine that if Martin Luther King where alive today he would probably be fighting to make access to education/information available to all Americans. Without it you are an outcast, without it you are poor. America is still very far from offering a fair level playing field to its children. If you look at a wifi map of Manhtattan you realize how sad it is to see how access to information/educational resources drastically drop North of 96th street. When I read about Google´s plan of connecting San Francisco through wifi I wonder…why not Harlem? Why not connecting the poorest 20 million Americans so they and their children have equal access to information? When are countries going to be judged by how their poorest, and not their richest citizens are doing?