I’ve been toying with the idea of buying the SMC Skype WiFi phone but never had a real reason for it apart from the obvious gadgetness (gadgetosity? ) of the thing. However, eBay internally uses Skype quite a bit so I went for it. It’s a nice little phone, I now have Skype in my pocket around the house and wherever I can find free WiFi…

..and there’s the snatch, of course. Free WiFi isn’t exactly ubiquitous. So, Skype sponsors you a FON access point when you buy this SMC phone. FON is a great idea and might actually work, being solidly grounded in the advantages of network effects - the more Foneros (and Foneras, I assume) the world counts, the better the system works. Here’s the deal: you give away free access through your FON access point, you get free access to all other FON routers. If you don’t want to do that, you can sell access to your access point - non-sharers, public and FON sellers alike, can buy day passes for $3 which is quite a bit less than the 10 pound sterling/day I paid T-Mobile the last time I was on the road.

Google maps show you the location and activity of FON routers, so you can always check out where you will have coverage (in reality, certainly at this point in major cities like Amsterdam, the answer is “almost nowhere”, but that will hopefully change). It’s a disruptive way of spreading low-cost WiFi, and here’s to hoping that FON will be able to seriously cut into the market, forcing the Telcos to adjust their ridiculous WiFi pricing schemes.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 14th, 2007 at 9:01 am and is filed under Kitchensink. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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