[CWN-Summit] FON

[Dave Chakrabarti]

David,

So I picked a bad example :) But I'm sure you'll agree that FON has
managed to reach a fairly large number of people in a short period of
time, and is positioning itself to reach into the non-geek,
non-early-adopter community. They're currently building a non-WRT4G
router specifically for FON, branded and produced with dual SSIDs off
the bat, one for internal networks and one for the shared hotspot...this
would effectively make it possible for FON to ship you a router that you
just plug in and turn on, which is the step the telcos had to take
before DSL wifi became ubiquitous (and also the reason so many home wifi
installations are insecure). 

dd-wrt doesn't provide a hotspot experience off the bat, but you can
mimic T-mobile's captive portal with Chillispot. Then if you've got a
central server handling logins, you've got distributed Hotspot
capability. All the tools are free. FON's just building on them.

Without a centralized server, I'm not sure how you'd handle
authorizations. Maybe you don't need authorizations? Maybe we just need
to serve up a page that says hey, this is social source wifi sharing,
use it for free and enjoy...and incidentally, here's a link to a how-to
if you'd like to set this up on your connection, here's a map of local
community tech resources, etc?

I'd like to explore some of the tech aspects of this idea further, and
FON's TOS seem vague...they pretty much want you to leave your FON box
connected indefinitely, but they only say they'll charge you for the
router if your FON box hasn't registered within thirty days of your
receiving it (meaning that the heartbeat script hasn't managed the
"handshake" with the central server). So now that I've done that, what
if I install dd-wrt and just don't use FON anymore? This seems unclear. 

An intermediate step: I'm going to see if I can install dd-wrt and get
it to keep using the FON service. There are some things that would be
truly useful that FON doesn't seem to be developing, like the ability to
wifi bridge or mesh network the routers.

My main concern with FON is the privacy / security side of the equation.
As someone pointed out on their forums, the FON service presents a
gigantic marketing opportunity. Everything goes through their DNS. They
could have a log of all of your traffic and all of your content /
conversations in an effort to a. sell you stuff and b. keep our
terrorist-hunting governments happy. I'm not well-versed with wifi /
networking tech enough to know how this works, but since everything runs
through their portal, I'm assuming it's feasible. Giving Google's
affinity for this kind of marketing, I'm also a little nervous that
they've invested heavily in the FON project.

Thoughts?

  Dave.


> ------------------------------
> 
> Message: 2
> Date: Thu, 7 Sep 2006 17:53:09 -0500
> From: David Young <dyoung at pobox.com>
> Subject: Re: [CWN-Summit] FON
> To: cwn-summit at lists.cuwireless.net
> Message-ID: <20060907225309.GN6623 at che.ojctech.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
> 
> On Thu, Sep 07, 2006 at 03:42:55PM -0500, Dave Chakrabarti wrote:
> > The point is also that this firmware has been available for quite a
> > while...but almost no one had really heard of it. Fon was the first
> > (that I know of) to create a centralized login portal and build the
> > "system" for this kind of wifi sharing, and also the first to market
> the
> > concept. You've heard of FON. You haven't heard of dd-wrt. Clearly,
> > they're having some effect.
> 
> But I have heard of DD-WRT. :-) I think you will agree, it does not
> provide a universal hotspot service---i.e., a service like T-Mobile's:
> 
> > Also, it's worthwhile to note that the firmware is only half the
> > game...you still need a centralized server to manage everyone's
> login
> > information, at the least. Otherwise, how does my router know to log
> you
> > in? It follows that all of our portals must also link up to this
> central
> > server, etc. That makes this a little less straightforward than a
> router
> > with firmware that magically does all of this.
> 
> I am not so sure that you need a central server.  That is just the
> conventional way of solving this kind of authorization problem,
> especially
> if you want to collect a "toll" for use. :-)
> 
> Dave
> 
> -- 
> David Young             OJC Technologies
> dyoung at ojctech.com      Urbana, IL * (217) 278-3933