WiFi Community FON Strikes Partnership With British Telecom

Ever heard of FON? It?s a WiFi network, built, wonderfully enough, by individual consumers and small businesses in Europe and many other parts of the world.

It works on a tiered system of paid and free access. If people opt in to become a ?Fonero? and set up a FON account and hotspot of their own, they can get free access from any other FON hotspot in the world. If one doesn?t complete all aforementioned introductory steps, one can still access FON hotspots, only that access must be paid for. A very simple concept, and in practice, so far a very successful venture.

Yesterday, British Telecom, after a well-publicized round of talks with the company, decided to make official its intended investment in the outfit. And why not? FON's infrastructure goes hand in hand with the one assembled by BT.

After all, FON doesn?t provide the Internet access itself. It only serves as a sort of middleman, providing the software (and wireless hardware, if necessary) to make WiFi points throughout the world as easy and as safe to connect to as possible.

FON has so far taken off like a rocket on the European continent. Its place of origin is Spain, and it has already managed to convince great swaths of well-populated cities and towns throughout Europe to join its network. The company has also made headway in rural parts of Asia, Africa, South America and Australia, making it the largest WiFi ?community? in the world.

BT?s investment in FON isn?t groundbreaking news, but it?s the first well-documented moment of the company?s acceptance by a large telecom corporation. As FON structures itself on broadband networks already established around the globe, it seems on the face of things to ?piggyback? on the services of others (that is at least the way it is likely viewed by telecom service providers in the US), but as WiFi is almost by default accepted globally as something to be made free and open, FON essentially promises to deliver a consistent, Starbucks-like everpresence, and a secure one at that. BT appears to recognize that with this new deal.

FON is seen as playing a constructive and useful role, and for that it?s been able to grow tremendously. Really, if US networks were to do things right, they would partner with the company as well and allow users to purchase access points with no threat of a EULA-imposed penalty (FON, after all, has to sustain itself, which it presumably does through a combination of hardware sales and the charges levied on non-Foneros) so as to gain free on-the-go access if one should so need it.

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