While some industry and business experts seem to think Fon will do well, some are not expecting wide adoption. Here's a little breakdown for you:
Looks great:
Cool idea, enough money from Martin's prior work, great advisory board with wide acceptance in the community – it seems the company can do the trick if it it overcomes the risks (security and failure to reach a critical mass).
If it succeeds you'll have the next Skype here.
FON actually got started just a couple months ago with a blog post Martin wrote, brainstorming about how one could create a new kind of distributed wifi network. In early October he started the company. In late October he got Boingboing-ed. Now it's a rapidly-growing company, launching today in France, already launched in Spain and Sweden.
FON works by rewriting the firmware on your wireless router, adding an access layer, a billing layer and, ultimately, bandwidth shaping to the router. Right now, this means it only works on one model of Linksys router – in the future, it's intended to run on any wireless access point that can be "flashed" with Linux. This is the same technical strategy a lot of smart mesh networking folks are exploring, making routers run Linux, then running mesh protocols on top of the OS.
maybe:
Sounds like a kooky hippe free-love type of scheme? I thought so, but I also take Martin seriously. He explicitly calls it his next start-up. He has started a couple of companies before – Jazz Telecom and Ya.com – and sold them like any good capitalist. This is not an open source project. He is hoping to build a giant business out of this.
Read the comments on Om's blogs for more insight from some of the VoIP media. Many are pessimistic, so you'll get a good all-around view of what people are thinking on Fon.
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I’m still very confused about how he expects not to have his Bills/Linus’ISP accounts terminated when they are discovered to have violated the Acceptable Use Policy of their ISP (Comcast, in my case). Sure, the argument can be made that it will take COmcast quite a while until they can actually track and terminate accts of those Foneros, but it will happen – and it doesn’t seem to be a viable long term biz model. I know he is working with ISPs to get them to Fon-up, but unless he has some pretty sophisticated rev share models, I don’t know why an ISP would allow this.
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