Fon Movement - The best way to get wireless at home and while you travel

We all know how much it costs to get wireless installed at home. There are cheap routers which do the work, but if one wants reliability the best way to go is Linksys, a $60 dollar or more investment, depending on the features.

There is a better, more affordable way. Have you heard of the Fon Movement?

Fon Movement, or also known as Movimiento Fon, is the largest WiFi (wireless) community in the world. It is quite simple idea but a really good one: you share your WiFi at home but in return you get to use the free WiFi wherever you find other Fonero’s Access Point, and there are many.

Now, for about $15 USD (including S&H), you get a nice little wireless router. It is white, pretty, compact, and just beautiful. All you have to do is connect it to your cable or dsl modem, network hub, or other wireless router and you are on.

What makes this great is that if you do not already have a wireless router, now you got one for a really good price. It is important that your other piece of equipment which provides you with internet has an Ethernet port, i.e. a network cable connection. If you have a USB based adsl/cable modem you are out of luck; Fon works only with Ethernet port Based devices.

Once it is plugged in to both power and internet source (via included network cable) you are ready to go. Your new little wireless router is now sending two wireless signals – a secured one (for your personal home use) , and a public one – so other Foneros and aliens can get access.

There is a nice and self explanatory Installation Guide included which will take you through the whole 5 minute installation process. Once it is all set up, anyone can log in to the public part and gain internet access.

Now this is where it gets even more interesting. Once you set up you router you get to choose what type of user you are: Linus (as in Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux), or Bill (as in Bill Gates, the richest man in US/World(?)).

As Linus, you offer free internet access to all other Foneros. If an alien stops by, i.e. anyone other than a Fonero user (say your neighbor), he/she can use the internet through your public wireless hot-spot, after paying $3 USD – which in Linus case goes directly to the Fon Movement.

As Bill, you offer free internet access to all other Foneros as well, but if an alien logs on, you get 50% of all income – $1.50 per paying user.

The catch with being Bill is that when you go traveling around, other Fonero Access Points are not free for you, but rather you’ll have to pay as well, whereas Linus – you get free access but no profit. You can also change from Linus to Bill, but only twice per year.

Once you decide to share your internet connection, you can limit how much bandwidth of your
connection is given to the WiFi users as well – so do not worry about too many people logging on and sucking up all of your bandwidth. La Fonera is very configurable (easy and through the web).

So, I hope my experience with La Fonera shines some light on you and gives you a good idea on how to save money on a nice wireless router for your home/business and get a free access to an ever-growing WiFi community in thousands of locations all over the world.

On the other hand, if you do not need a free access all over the world, and especially if you are around a crowded downtown area with a lot of cafés and such – you can offer a very affordable WiFi access (compared to T-mobile HotSpot, etc.), make some money, and be a part of something really great.

To find a Fonero near you, check out their map at: http://maps.fon.com
To get more info about what’s FON: http://en.fon.com/info/whats_fon.php

New Gadget

Long time again since my last post. I am busy finishing up ACI's Grants Administration.

In the meantime, I got myself a new gadget - Nokia 770 Internet Tablet. At first I did not like it much, but then I just decided to get it anyways because I do a lot of news and blogs reading around the clock and this device, combined with it's integration of Google Talk, Gizmo Project VoIP phone, and sweet little RSS reader amongst the other cool features was the best choice out there.

To find out more go to: www.nokiausa.com/770 :)

That's it for now. Will write more later on, and will include the little tutorial as I said in my last post.

Here we go again :)

All rite,
As of this moment the links on my website point to this blog here. Old WordPress blog has been depricated and now I can concentrate more on writing something rather than endlessly setting up the blog to look exactly as I want it to.

News: I finally set the home server the way it was meant to be in the first place - a machine always running and always available from anywhere. All my documents are now on the server and I can get to them in many ways: through the web, through VPN, through FTP, and even SVN. Nice thing is that I got SVN and Trac setup on it, so finally all my projects can enjoy Version Control like never before. It was really about the time to start using SVN, and all I can say is about it is - IT IS WONDERFUL!

I try to post a nice tutorial on how to install all of this on your own machine, not because I think you can't, but it's nice to have a tutorial around especially if you are new to the whole Version Control thing. I can definitely say that at this moment I am not a n00b anymore when it comes to SVN :)

Just for those who wonder, here is what the server has now: It is a Windows XP Pro based machine, Apache 2 Web Server, IIS as well on another port so I can log in through the web-based terminal service, WS-FTP server (great since it can use windows accounting to audit users), SVN and TRAC - the latest version of both. TortoiseSVN client is a wonderful little thing which you just must have as well.

Now, if you ask why I did all of this - there is only one answer: To completely free up my poor laptop. The little bugger was getting so slow because it was running all of this on it's back. Now, I can finally relax knowing all of my data is on the server, backed up every night, and my laptop is enjoying like I would be if I was on Bahamas right now - with beautiful sounds and curves of Windows Vista RC1, Office 12, and all other files just click away on another share.

Vista RC1 is really a think of beauty. I tested all of the other versions of Vista since it was an instable Longhorn Aplha, and I did get disappointed many times in the process, but now I can confidently say - Microsoft had done something no one else could! People can brag about it as much as they want, I do not care, I think this is seriously the best operating system out there, and the moment it comes out I will buy it!

I have been stressing it for about 3 days now, Non-Stop, from normal office work to web development and everything in between and not once did I see even a hiccup! The drivers which could not be detected automatically were installed in a jiffy when I pointed Vista to search for them in my Win XP directory on another partition. Since then, I am just amazed! It makes me more productive just looking at the beauty in front of my own eyes.

Ok, I think this is enough for now. I do not usually make posts this long, so sorry about that, but I haven't posted anything since a really long time ago, and I just feel like I should. I am also not writing this just for you, but rather myself as well. My blogs have always been some form of my personal diary :)

All best,
Peconi

HelloBlogger

Hey,

Let's just see how this works. I used WordPress on my own server for quite some time now, but Blogger is looking better day by day. I like the new theme available in beta, which you are seeing right now. It reminds me a lot of Microsoft's Visual Studio and pages associated with it, and that's exactly in what mood I am lately. C# is really cool...

I will write more later.

Peace.