“Fonatical”? no shit.
wow - there’s been a lot of talk about Fon - the spanish wifi-sharing company - because of their announcement about funding. and it’s being discussed / dissected on the CWN (community wireless network) mailing lists that I’m on.
It’s not the money that I mind (20 million) and I’m not scared of them having an impact in Canada. But what’s weird is that everyone’s critic is turned off. I mean, listen to this:
“To be honest while I loved the idea of FON from the start I had no idea how successful the company would be, we still don’t know where FON will be in 5 years. But I do know that it has the potential to help many people! I joined for FON’s potential. Everyone I know at FON has joined for its potential to do good while doing business. They are dedicated, passionate and FONactical. Really! And that is what a movement is.
Of course as the ecosystem of FON develops, more people who are not interested in the “movement” will board the ship and thats fine. But the core of FON, what will make it a success are these people working in Spain at 4AM. Those early Foneros who joined when we only had 1000K hotspots and it didn’t really “make sense” to share. Our board of advisors who see FON as something that could help communities around the world.”
Ethan Zuckerman’s on the board too and I appreciate the main reason he’s excited about the project:
“I got involved with FON not so that I could get free WiFi around the world, but because I think FON is thinking through the hard questions neccesary to help provide inexpensive wireless access around the entire world. I’ve looked closely at projects designed to build community wireless networks and have been frustrated that many of these projects seem designed explicitly for nations where bandwidth is cheap. Most let users share their bandwidth, but don’t provide a way to charge other users for using that bandwidth, or to “throttle back” users who clog your pipe downloading films from Limewire. There’s a philosophical bias to many of these projects - a belief that Internet access is an inalienable right and should be free - that I find charming, but totally impractical for the parts of the world I’m most concerned about.”
This is someone who was one of the first working on using WiFi in developing nations when he started GeekCorps in Ghana - so he should be listened to, but at the same time, I don’t think he’s been involved in much connectivity digital divide work in the last 3-4 years (it’s hard to imagine how he could be with all the other work that he’s been doing).
So if this project is supposed to be so exciting because of it’s community and digital divide implications, who do they have involved from the CWN world? Some leaders of CWNs like Sascha Meinrath who’s organized the last two Wireless Community Summits? Anthoney Townsend who’s been an emmisary for this stufff? Matthew Westervelt who was one of the guys that got this all rolling? Maybe one of the authors of the recent Wireless Networking in the Developing World like Rob Flickenger or Thomas Krag each of whom have years of thinking about this and working on it and who are up-to-date?
Hmm, let’s take a look at who’s on the board? Yikes - a bunch of entrepreneurs, a couple techies, and some bloggers. That’s not to disparage them - i’m obviously taken with people like Ethan, Joi, and Gilmore. But this isn’t their thing - none of them spend their days working in this area.
I get the point that most CWNs aren’t very successful in terms of adoption, and that this has to be a successful business to survive, but this has a lot to do with the resources they’ve had (basically none). I really think they should be getting advice from *someone* in the CWN area. Especially with this veneer of being a “community” (man, they are pushing that angle really hard) and considering they are thinking about solving digital divide issues. To be clear, I don’t think an organization or company run only by people from CWNs would be worth shit - I think we are missing a lot of skill sets and experience that would be necessary for this to succeed. But Fon not having anyone involved from the field is more than weird.
UPDATE: Ethan wrote something that responds to a few of the questions that I had. Apparently he is still involved in CWNs through his work at OSI. And he’s taken steps to try to involved a CWN leader.
That’s cool. Frankly, I actually have no problem with their project - it’s just that I don’t think it’s that cool. At least not as is (sans kick ass community portal page aggregating locative info as well as serving as a place where social interaction can take place - between users (a la neighbornode) or between the node owner and users). I just think the recent hype is overblown and is mostly an illustration of the continued impact of A-list bloggers.
February 9th, 2006 at 10:51 pm
(Un)Wiring the Planet
A new book called Wireless Networking in the Developing World A Practical Guide to Planning and Building Low-Cost Telecommunications Infrastructure, tries to explain exactly what its name implies. Using cheap hardware and existing standards, it is po…
February 10th, 2006 at 7:36 am
I saw some noise about Fon a while back, and just shrugged it off as ’spanish joltage’. Perhaps the 20M plus the google love will help them survive a little longer, but as you, Rob and a few others have pointed out, it smells a lot more like astroturf than grass roots.