You Can't Get There From Here
Several years ago I wrote a column describing a system I had thought up for sharing Internet hotspots that I called WhyFi. Among the readers of that column were some entrepreneurs in Spain who went on to start the hotspot sharing service called FON …
Context & Ripple Effects
The lineage runs straight through this column: Cringely's earlier WhyFi proposal for sharing Internet hotspots was read by entrepreneurs in Spain who went on to build it as FON, a global community of 'Foneros' who install FON software on their home routers — a path Martin Varsavsky himself recounted when the project launched.
The idea had already crossed into the mainstream by January 2006, when the New York Times framed broadband sharing as a way to increase speed. What changes with this piece is scale: FON has moved from grassroots router installs to a confirmed partnership with BT, aiming at hundreds of thousands of hotspots covering the entire U.K., with a rumored — still unconfirmed — funding round of up to €10 million involving existing investors Google, Skype and Index Ventures circulating since March.
First-order effects
- BT subscribers who opt in gain roaming access to what the two companies aim to make hundreds of thousands of U.K. hotspots, while FON gets its first national-carrier distribution channel instead of relying on individual downloads from its website.
- BT effectively converts every participating customer's home router into network edge infrastructure it does not have to build or backhaul itself.
Second-order effects
- Other European ISPs and telcos — the audience FON is explicitly positioned as attractive to — must now choose between copying the BT model and policing router-level sharing as a terms-of-service violation.
- An unconfirmed new round from Google, Skype and Index Ventures, if it lands, would bankroll FON's expansion beyond the U.K. and raise the price of staying out of community Wi-Fi for rival carriers.
Third-order effects
- If carriers keep adopting rather than blocking shared Wi-Fi, broadband competition shifts from raw megabits delivered at home toward coverage away from home, with a third-party software layer like FON's sitting between ISPs and their own subscribers.
- The pattern points toward residential routers becoming dual-purpose assets — private connection plus public hotspot — which eventually forces regulators and ISPs to settle who pays for the shared bandwidth.
The trend: Telcos are flipping from policing residential Wi-Fi sharing to adopting it as a coverage feature, with FON's carrier partnerships turning home routers into distributed network infrastructure.