Martin Varsavsky has started many company’s up to now. He has demonstrated he has the skill to master entrepreneurship in fields as varied as Real Estate, Medical, and Telecommunications. Two of his biggest successes have been “ya.com” and Jazztel, probably his most famous company up to date. But it looks as if this will change soon, as preparations for FON are nearing their end. The company will officialy launch its program November 7th, as Varsavsky announced on his official webpage( http://spanish.martinvarsavsky.net). So what exactly IS FON? you might be asking yourselves right about now. Why is it such a revolutionary idea and why is it receiving so much coverage all over the internet?
Well, it is ordinary an idea as it may seem. Varsavsky wants to create a WiFi community in Spain, where members share their wifi connection which in turn shares it with anybody else who has given their connection password to the company. Perhaps it is necessary to put it in a different way.(my parents certainly thought so when I first explained it to them)
You have a WiFi connection in your house.You give your connection password to FON(and so do another 1000people). While travelling in Your city, or for that matter, anywhere in Spain, you can use anybody’s wifi connection provided that they are members of the “tribe”, and additionally have access in >Starbucks and other establishments of the sort. For those technically deprived people(me included) who do not have a wifi connection to give they can either pay a fixed rate (about the price of an adsl line) to enter the group, or ask FON to install WiFi in their homes. This idea may seem bad because of the vast areas of land that have to be covered, but with a large number of members(something that looks likely from the way the news has shaken the internet world) it can be a very powerful idea. So powerful(when linked to WiFi phones), that it could even threaten Telefonica’s monopoly of spanish communications.