Last week I mentioned the FON free router giveaway, but this week I’m going to dive a little deeper into the service that is FON. FON is “the world’s largest WiFi community”. The service works like this: Members share their wireless Internet access at home, and in return, can get free WiFi access through any of the other Fonero Access Points.
There are two ways of sharing your Internet. Either you’re a Linus, and you share your WiFi in exchange for free WiFi from other users, or you’re a Bill, and you sell your WiFi by the day and split the profits with FON (you can also be an Alien and pay for the FON service, but who wants to do that?). The La Fonera router is a special kind of router that outputs two signals. One is a private signal that you can use just for yourself for a secure connection that you don’t have to share. The other is a public signal that other Fon users and Aliens can access. You can even personalize the page that other Foneros see when they log onto your FON Access Point, telling them a little about yourself, your local area, or just to say “hi” to other members. Since the service gets better and better as more people sign on and share their Internet, FON has been running a series of promotions lately to give away free Fonero routers to just about anyone who wants one. Their latest promotion is called Fonbucks, where “FON + Starbucks = cash for you”. It works like this: If you live above or near a Starbucks (or any café/coffee shop) they’ll send you a free router that you can use to steal some of Starbucks’ wireless revenue with. Users pay $2 per day (much less than the $10 that Starbucks charges for a single day), and you receive $1 of that in return. It’s a definite win-win, a hopefully a good way of spreading the “movimiento” (movement). If you’re interested in free WiFi, or making some cash off of sharing your own, then definitely check out FON, because the more users the better.
Bonus: I’ve got a free La Fonero router to give away to one lucky DYH reader. If you want it, just say so in the comments, and I’ll pick out one comment at random and send a router your way. It’s Fontastic.
[FON]
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