I know what FON is until you ask me to define it

There seems to be a developing buzz about the new Spanish start-up company FON around the blogging world at the moment. As someone very interested in the changes that are happening around Web 2.0 and P2P applications, plus someone who like the owner of FON is an english speaker in Spain (it turns out he’s originally from Argentina), this caught my interest- the similarities end there, by the way; I don’t have a spare $500 million lying around yet.

It seems to be applying the same priciples of P2P and Web 2.0 to the networking process itself- what those principles exactly are is harder to define and is maybe somthing for a later article- like St. Augustine said when asked to define Time- ‘I know what time is until you ask me to define it’- well, I know what Web 2.0 is until you ask me to define it.

The idea is basically that you share your wireless connection, either for free, in which case you get to share other people’s connections for free, or you ask people to pay, in which case you have to pay for the service itself (this part isn’t functioning yet though). Sounds simple enough…

Google and Skype obviously agree that this idea has legs, and have invested a lot of money in it, which is allowing FON to get off the ground by offering cheap wireless routers already set up for their service.

So I dug a bit deeper and there seem to be some objections- that the owner of FON is not as altruistic as he seems (and he has gone for some very altruistic, Barcelona-squatter-graffiti style design on the FON website). There are some questions about what the real intention of the company is.

Also at this point it seems unclear as to whether Telefónica and the other Spanish ISPs are going to like these new developments, but I would think that contrary to what FON is saying- that sharing your broadband is good for ISPs- they will take the opposite view; however this doesn’t mean that it won’t work- do Telefónica like the way Skype is taking away their long-distance call money? Probably not, but they like the way people are getting broadband in order to use Skype. Do record companies like the way BitTorrent and other P2P is eating into their profits? No, but Apple have shown with I-Tunes that if you go with the flow rather than fighting against it, then there is still money to be made, and FON are offering to share profits with the ISPs, which seems the least they can do under the circumstances. The thing might take off to the extent that the ISPs have no choice- I know that people here in Catalunya are desperate to get away from Telefónica’s mediaeval-style monopoly.

Some bloggers have found out that there is money to be made in writing about FON (also this, and this in Spanish)- but let me say here and now, that I am literally not being paid a penny to write this blog entry, and if any of this dirty money comes a-knocking at my door, I will be forced to say ‘come on in, I’ll write whatever you like if the price is right’. Well, maybe, I’ll just have to cross that bridge when I come to it….