Fon: Share WIFI, build a WIFI Nation!

Martin Varsavsky yesterday launched FON, in Spain. This is his third telecom/internet company in that country of 44 million people. He started Jazztel in 1998, today Spain´s second largest publicly traded telecom operator and Ya.com, today Spain´s second largest internet site after Terra. But while Jazztel and Ya.com are very local, FON can be very global, like Skype. FON is the P2P of WIFI and Martin wants to find the best way to launch FON around Europe and the rest of the world. What is FON? Very simple. At FON they developed a software client that you download from the net and you install it in your wifi base station. At that moment your wifi gives you a password of your choice but starts accepting all the other passwords of all the other FON members. FON is based on the premise that with wifi now being 54MB on cable and DSL platforms of 1MB or more, wifi users are only taking advantage of 3% of their capacity on the average or in other words wasting 97% of their capacity. At the same time what users want is for their laptops, PDAs, wifi phones, and soon wifi enable ipods, wifi enable digital cameras to access to everyone else´s wifi so they can walk around cities taking pictures, listening to music, playing games on wifi playstations, etc. This they want to accomplish by turning millions of wifi installations into a unified wifi FON network with a standard interface to accept all kind of wifi enabled devices. So don't be square, be a fonero! and sign up today!