The opportunity is not merely in enabling wireless clients to share the Internet, but to access resources on the LAN … particularly at venues where Internet is unavailable, unnecessary or unreasonably priced. This is where most of the available routers fall down.

Having grown as a company in parallel to companies like FON and Meraki we have followed all the transitions that you described, and WeFi has changed as well along those lines.

The fact is that whether they like it or not, Carriers are desperately seeking to give users the desired wireless Internet experience (just as you described), and knowing that 3G/4G technology have no change to keep up with the demand, they realize now that Wi-Fi provides the missing pieces of the puzzle. So we believe their end-game will be to provide a service, transparent to the user, which gets them connected to the best available bandwidth source around, a lot of which will be Wi-Fi networks which are already deployed “in the wild” (and not only “carrier controlled” hotspots like Wayport, T-Mobile etc.)

So what I foresee is an intertwined ecosystem of Wi-Fi technologies (Meraki-type mesh networks, dual/shared routers like FON’s, manged hotspots as well as a zillion different types of simple low-cost routers) and a smart system controlled by carriers which knows how to navigate and keep the user connected either over 3G/4G or the surrounding Wi-Fi.