Hooked on FONics
Out of idle curiousity, I signed up for a cheapy wireless router from FON.
For those not familiar, this is a startup, funded by Google and Skype, that's attempting to create a worldwide pay-for WiFi network out of a mish-mash of broadband connections. You sign up for an account with them, pay $3, and get 24 hours access to any wireless router on their network.
People running the routers and sharing their network connections have a choice: Sign up as a "Linus", make no money from sharing your connection, but have free access to the whole FON network, or sign up as a "Bill" and get 50% of FON's charges from people using your router.
To bootstrap their network, they have an offer of a wireless router for $5. Five bucks (plus another eight for shipping) netted me a Linksys WRT54GS, which retails for $70 normally. It came preloaded with their firmware, which is based on the excellent, excellent OpenWRT Linux distribution for Linksys routers, and the ChilliSpot wireless portal to stop freeloaders.
Of course, handing out cheap routers gets you a little way, but it doesn't create a terribly useful network. In my neck of the woods, there are plenty of FON access points, but they're all just in random residential areas dotted around the city, not in any place where you'd actually want to sit and surf. And residential areas such as this are already chock-full of open unprotected WiFi access points. I can see three from where I'm sat now (not counting my own).
The hobbyists like me who go "Cheap router that runs Linux? Cheers!", register it online (fulfilling all obligations for the price point), then wipe it and install OpenWRT from scratch will eat through their reported $21M, while the coffee shops and airports continue to sign with T-Mobile, Wandering Wifi, etc.
So if you want a dirt-cheap linux-running WiFi router, then this is an excellent deal. And once FON inevitably goes titsup, you can keep it next to your CueCat in your personal Museum of Free Hardware from Poorly-Thought-Out but Well-Funded Startups.
