Yesterday I attended the Wireless Community Camp 2007 organized by http://www.wifisoft.org, Held in Oegstgeest the Netherlands. I attended because I was curious on what two of my colleagues where up to - while they did some infrastructure work in June. The Camp Lasted one week, but I only attended Saturday. So I arrived late and came in the middle of a presentation of FON.
Fon is a project aimed at sharing your bandwith with others over a WIFI network. The benefit you get by doing so is that you can use all other FON hotspot around the world for free. If you are not a member of fon you can become a member for a small fee. The idea is to broadcast two networks from the same Wifi Access point, one is going to be the FON network, the other one which is open (but supposed to be protected by the first one), is your personal network.
I was temped to join but as I live on the 6th floor people in the street would probably not benefit from my FON access point. Then I discovered that I would probably need a La Fonera device, a small access point. While the device looks nice and cool I have two issues with it. I usually like to be able to plug cables in my routers not just Wifi ones, and on that thing I just can't. It heats to much. But nevertheless the project seems interesting and I was able to spot two Fonspots, one in the apartment building I live in den Haag, the other one near my parents.
There is also a bunch of software being develop to turn your mac or your PC into a FON access point, the Mac version does not on PowerPC :-(.
Then the camp headed two the center of Leiden to take a boat tour. The idea was to detect as many WIFI signal as possible. The boat trip was fun and I discovered parts of Leiden I did not know. I did not participate to the detection contest.But while we where cruising the canal that split the central market in two, the guy looking for discoverable Bluethooth device food 300 of those !! Then we went back to the camp to get a nice barbecue. I really enjoyed my day and will probably spend more time to WCC next year.
Wireless Community Camp 2007
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You should check out Whisher. They're doing something really cool in the same space.
No... the accesspoint broadcasts 2 ssid's...
MyPlace (WPA/TKIP)
FON_AP (Web authentication using a Captive Portal using Chillispot (Radius authentication))
The accesspoint "broadcasts" these 2 SSID's
And Fon is free like beer...
I give you a beer and expect a beer from you when i'm visiting you
Fon makes this easy...
also it's plug and play... just insert it in a free ethernet socket... and a poweroutlet...and your first website on the Public wifi will be to register it on your emailadres so you can use your emailadres as authentication on the other fon hotspots you mentioned...
It's mostly illegal to access the hotspots found using the wardriving... but not the FON_AP's... It's not because someone left his door open...that you are "invited" to come in...
FON_AP looks open and the first page is the "welcoming" page... you can "even" customize it a bit... but it's not necessary...most people don't take even that time
The FONERA broadcasts by default in 360degrees... you don't have to cover a street... you have probably neighbours left,right, above,in front, behind, under you that could have used your internet access when they needed it while they don't need it for eg the whole month?