Early this past December, about two years after first hearing about it, I decided to give Fon a try. Taking advantage of a holiday offer available to me, I went ahead and ordered my own Fonera and Fontenna from their online store. Although I still have a lot of qualms about most of the security, legal and technical issues regarding its use and policy, I thought it was probably worth giving it a try after all. So about three weeks later, the Fonera and its Panel Directional Antenna (Fontenna) arrived this morning. Here’s some of the things I thought were worthy of some mention:
- The official Fon firmware sucks. Bigtime. It is based on OpenWrt, but crippled and quite limiting in terms of what the user can do. I quickly installed the FreeWLan addons that make its use more tolerable. FreeWLan as well as FrancoFon (another community writing addons for the Fon hardware) make a considerable effort to not violate the Fon T&Cs.
- It’s very frustrating that you cannot — without messing with ssh or hacking the scripts — disable the Private Wifi signal. With the FreeWLan addons you can at least hide it or bridge the damn thing to your wired network, thus turning it into an AP. This seems like a very stupid omission, especially considering how limited the 2.4GHz spectrum is. Most people I know already have a wireless signal that they use on ADSL gateways or APs infinitely more configurable than the Foneras and the fact that the latter cannot turn its second WiFi signal off effectively means that there’s additional EM pollution in this band for no particular reason.
- The Fontenna, a Panel antenna that can be bought from the Fon site for cheap, seems to reach or even exceed the transmission power limits of the 2.4GHz band in several countries (see 100mw EIRP or 20-25dBm). For others it’s at the limit. Fon does not seem to worry or control the sale of this product in such jurisdictions.
- I have no idea if the Fonera device has a second internal antenna inside, or whether the Fontenna is used to transmit both the public and the private Wifi signals. I hope the latter is not the case.
- The Fonera device is quite cute, very small and does not look as cheap as I thought it would. There have been several well documented problems with it, however, such as an overheating issue, its inability to play well with some Intel and Cisco WiFi devices and its intolerance of older 10MBit switches. Most of these have been discussed in Fon’s forum.
- There’s a score of privacy and consumer rights issues arising with Fon (the company, not its users) having access to your local network while at the same time not letting you configure your router properly. Fortunately The FreeWLan addons seem to disable automatic updating of the Fon firmware.
- Very few ISPs in this country (Hellas) have expressly permitted the use of Fon-like devices in their customers’ networks. For what it’s worth, I suggest you stick to being a Linus. Unlikely as it may be, this way they have little reason to prosecute you from profiting from their network.
- The web page for configuring your router and locating it in the world just doesn’t work. It sucks bigtime, especially for countries outside of the US.
I generally like the idea of Fon. Yet, most of my concerns (originally expressed to some extent here) still hold. In addition to this, while they managed to create a simple ‘plug-and-play’ device, they ignore the real needs of the majority of their users by crippling or otherwise restricting the functionality of the device. The Fon firmware is a mediocre implementation at best, and one that takes advantage of Open Source software and the community while arrogantly dismissing countless requests for improvements (most firmware updates between 0.7.1 and 0.7.2 just fixed ‘security holes’ used by the community to ‘liberate’ the foneras). As such, I do not feel keen on retaining a relationship with this company beyond what’s required of me by my contractual obligations to them. Unless a whole lot change with regards to the legal aspects of its use, the technical aspects of its firmware, the control it provides to its users and the level of transparency regarding where the money made from the use of the network by Aliens, I believe my Fon experiment will end on the 3rd of January 2009, i.e. the earliest date I’m allowed to leave the network. The way I see it it’s up to Fon to play nice and truly convince me about its intentions and service. Either way, I’ll be left with a nice, small, Atheros AR51 device I can then flash with OpenWRT proper and the accompanying Panel Antenna for me to play with and Fon users will get access to my broadband connection for a year. The ball is in Fon’s hands.