Fon as a grassroots effort seemed to me to be headed to the same dustbin that led other companies to abandon trying to get individuals and small businesses to install hardware that would turn them into hotspots. Let’s face it: most locations that are good for a hotspot are either already under contract, don’t want it, or are complicated. Someone’s house in the suburbs or an apartment in Manhattan are probably bad hotspots for different reasons. But if Fon is going to use the money and connections it now appears to have to seed its network, there’s more of a likelihood of it working, especially given what seems to be a very high commitment to signing up ISPs instead of signing up users and having them worry about whether their ISP finds Fon appropriate or not. To date, it’s been quite tricky to set up a hotspot with authentication (user accounts and billing) without either having enough traffic to warrant a for-fee provider setting up your service, or, if you don’t want to charge, without either taking on all the tasks yourself (and not using accounts) or paying a managed provider $50 per month to be part of their system and have them handle tech support. So Fon could fill a gap if they put out thousands of hotspots into cities that have gaps, and work with ISPs as a way to let customers easily build networks. I’m still pretty dubious about the notion of every home being a hotspot because that requires incredible luck and coordination to get continuous zones of coverage, and outdoor coverage really requires antennas — not just an access point in the window
