Spanish WiFi startup Fon is invading England. In its quest to turn everyone’s home and business WiFi router into a worldwide network of shareable hotspots, Fon just inked a long-rumored deal with British Telecom. BT’s three million broadband customers in the UK can now opt to join the Fon network, which gives them access to 190,000 WiFi hotspots around the world. BT joins Time Warner Cable in the U.S., and French broadband provider Neuf in endorsing Fon’s WiFi-sharing across their customers.
Most ISP service agreements still ban customers from reselling or sharing their broadband connection. But Fon is convincing some ISPs that it might actually be a selling point to be able to tell customers that included in their home broadband bill is access to free WiFi when they travel across town or across the world. Fon claims its network of WiFi hotspots is already the largest in the world. Investors in Fon include Google, Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures, and now BT as well.
I still wonder how FON could ever become popular. 99% of homes just aren’t interesting as a hotspot. 190.000 seems like a great number but not if those hotspots are all hidden and in practice only available to one person who installed it.
that 190K number is plain bullshit, just plug on to Fon and youll see that not even a 1% os those hotspots are functional. 190K maybe is the number of linksys routers they bought with Google and all those VC’s money and gave out mostly for free. FON is just vaporware, it’s about time decent and serious websites like Techcrunch make a real comment about FON and not just PR hype/bullshit.
FON is pure hype. No one runs these hotspots and WiFi wants to be free. They basically took the money from VCs and gave it too Cisco to buy APs and gave those away. More than half of those are not alive anymore. Heh.
Like poster #2 says, write a real story on them. Enough of this BS.
I have hearing this for such a long time….looks like it is really a hype
I’m not sure if FON is a viable business model. Regardless, perhaps the more interesting storyline is BT making the commitment to experiment with new applications.
As an incumbent Telco, they’re one of the more forward-looking broadband service providers. The separation of the retail and wholesale channel seems to be working for them, and their customers.