FON WiFi Network Gains Traction

FON, a startup planning to help WiFi hotspot owners to charge for access to their network, has received $22 million in funding from Google, Skype and other venture capital firms.

The Madrid-based company aims to allow users to make their home WiFi hotspots accessible to others so that wherever you are you can get hi-speed internet access. Obviously Google and Skype would be very interested in this prospect because it makes access to their Google Talk and Skype VoIP services uch easier, which means they stand to generate more revenue.

FON has already gained approximately 3,000 users worldwide who are making their WiFi network accessible but awareness of the service is building up, afterall the service is only 3 months old. Currently FON is compatible with only Linksys routers, but apparently they are working on support for other branded routers. Because FON ‘lives’ inside the router it is able to work on Linux, Windows and Mac OS X systems.

The cool thing is that users can sign up with FON and share their WiFi internet access for free, or they can charge a fee. This means that home and business users can actually generate revenue, but it remains to be seen how this will play with ISPs. Will they really approve of thousands of customers who basically resell their connection? If this service was to take off, I’m sure there will be significant opposition from those ISPs who would rather earn the revenue themselves with their own subscription-based WiFi networks.