My FON Router Experience

So I received my FON router last friday and I just wanted to quickly let the world know what my experience was. The thing is that it is a real first adopters device, so beware if you want to order one.

In the box is a short documentation of what you have to do and that is the first thing. It is really short and you really only have one option. Set-up the router behind your normal router, because the thing has to be online very fast. You boot it up, it gets its IP from your earlier router, you are connected to the FON router with your system though. Then you quickly launch a browser and it loads a FON registration page. There you will have to enter your user information and you will get an eMail allowing you to authenticate yourself as the owner of that router, or rather his MAC address. All this has to happen in 5 minutes or your Router will have to be turned off and on again. It worked after the third try. Finally online with my FON router.

But I could not access the router interface anymore. This is where you have to find out that they added some security patches to the system and now you can only open the interface of the system on the FON router via a network port and not via the WiFi interface. Oh well, once that was found out, I could get in. The interface is nicely done but a little low on features. It does allow you to set up PPPoE though and so I did. Here you should remember that saving those setting doesn’t suffice, but you will need to also Apply them. Then again, that didn’t do much good because I did not get the router to dial in via PPPoE. It might be trying, but I wouldn’t know because there isn’t a log anywhere to be found and I couldn’t connect via SSH to it anymore to look through the file system.

So I am back using two routers, which does work, but seems a bit stupid. I am hoping to eventually get some feedback from FON through the Forums. Mailing them at info@fon.com has not had any result for another question and the people in the forum say they weren’t really successful either. The Forum seems to be filled with users and not much else. All in all, FON seems to have fallen victim to their own success and are probably trying to hire like crazy. They seem to be getting sales people on board quickly but I’d really like them to hire a very good support guy that manages their call center or at least monitors the Forum.

The price for the router still comes out great and if you are wondering if you can use it without being with FON, it seems that you can hack your FON router (source) to make it ping FON periodically to say you are still using their system. We’ll see how long that works and it’s probably not something you really want or need to be doing. The system seems to work great as it is and I am looking forward to the software in Version 1.0, as it’s still 0.6, signifying at least a certain degree of beta status.

We’ll see how that story continues.

Technorati Tags: Customer Support, FON, Hacking, LinkSys