The “world’s largest wifi community”, FON, celebrates its first birthday (via Vecosys). Though I haven’t taken any part in the sharing of WiFi (namely as I still don’t have a wireless setup at home – update: that is an FON setup) I’m fully behind the idea of FON and think its a great movement for web users.
And for only EUR29.95 its not a bad price to start the sharing process. La Fonera can be split with a public (for sharing) and private (personal) channel for access so even if you’re up for a cheap wireless router, there’s a good place to begin.
Ken,
I don’t think you need an existing wireless router, just a network hub with access to your broadband connection. You would be sharing your broadband rather than your wifi.
In theory (I could be wrong about this) if you had just a USB broadband adapter and turned on ICS on your PC and connected it to a cheapo wired hub, the FON box could be plugged into the hub too to make use of your connection.
You know… you’re right on the money there. The one slipped my mind altogether!
Do you know yourself if there are restrictions on the amount of connections you can offer (depending I guess on how IPs are handled) or have you tried it yourself at all?
We have it set up here hanging off one of the ports on a normal hub. The only limits are on [a]how much bandwidth you want to share – minimum is 512kbs, I wish I could throttle that down and [b]how many DHCP clients can connect – I don’t know what that is set to (50 on my normal wireless router).
512 minimum eh? Still a chunky portion if you’re on a lower connection. Must actually sort out the DHCP setup at home, works a charm here in the office but would be reluctant to share the work connection – also I doubt there’d be much need to share the office one. Even still, 30 bucks isn’t bad for the Fonero at all.