FON gets upgrade
There we go. As I was told on Thursday, today is the great day of the FON Upgrade and Redesign. I still have to upgrade my own router when I am back at home, but things are looking promising. So what is new?
FON will quasi give away 1 Million nocat routers for 5 EURs plus Taxes and shipping. The routers normally cost 60 EURs. They already have 54.000 Foneros but they really want to push this to another level.
They want to have 50k active Hotspots this fall, and 1 million by end of 2007.
The Bill-Modell is launched. You can now select to be a Bill, getting money for all those that use your hotspot and giving up your right to use the other hotspots for Free. The money is managed through a PayPal account
“You are the # 13095 member of the FON Community, and you’re a linus” — that means that I share my bandwidth for free and can use the others routers for free too. How cool is that?
You can look at your Travel Log, in which you see where you logged on and how long you used the router and how much bandwidth you consumed.
You can see who is using your FON router.
You can edit the start page, allowing for two urls to be surfed for free, and giving some personal information.
You can managed your router remotely (with the new firmware which I still need to install, 0.6.6).
Sounds good enough? Check out the re-designed fon.com, log in and play around. congratulations for the relaunch people of FON! Looks great! Update : There seems to be a problem with the firmware in connection with the new updates to fon.com. I, and several others, can’t use the Wifi anymore. You can follow the discussion here. I’ll update when it is solved.
Update 2 : Check the general Forums for some information that changing the MTU on a host computer will solve the problem. It by now seems that FON is working on the problem. Monday the 3rd FON support had told me that the tech people are looking into it. Now the community seems to have found the cause. I still presume they changed the server config of login.fon.com. But we will see how long it takes until fon finds the solution.