Fon is a community of people who submit their Wi-Fi hotspots for inclusion in a global pool. By doing so they become “Foneros” who let others use their Wi-Fi connections for free, and in exchange they get to do the same around the world. Due to ISPs’ terms and conditions, which generally forbid letting strangers onto customers’ connections, this idea works best in concert with the ISPs themselves – BT in the UK was a trailblazer here, and DT is certainly one of the biggest ISPs that Fon has landed.

The DT offering is called WLAN TO GO, and through it DT’s customers who offer up their own connection, will gain access to around 8 million hotspots worldwide. As DT itself has 12 million broadband lines and around 12,000 Wi-Fi hotspots, there’s clearly scope for major expansion of Fon’s reach too – this deal doesn’t just cover Germany, but also DT’s local subsidiaries in Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, Slovakia and Hungary.

For DT, there’s an extra motivation too: if its customers start using more hotspots, they will theoretically use less mobile data – a boon for networks feeling the strain of bandwidth hogs such as mobile video. Here’s how DT CEO Rene Obermann put it in a statement this morning:

“The partnership with FON fits perfectly with Telekom’s network expansion strategy. The astonishing increase in data traffic calls for network optimization and expansion, as well as the implementation of new high-speed networks.

“By the year 2016, we want to set up more than 2.5 million additional hotspots in Germany with the WLAN TO GO offering. With our technology mix of mobile communication, fixed lines and Wi-Fi, we can gradually introduce our customers to the benefits of internet access anywhere and anytime.”

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What we do now know, though, is that Hrvatski Telekom, the leading Croatian ISP that is majority-owned by Deutsche Telekom, has just launched a Fon tie-in. The offer was revealed today, according to local blog Netocratic. I’ve asked DT whether this is a precursor to rollouts in other countries, but they declined to comment.

Fon is a crowdsourced Wi-Fi network that came out of Spain half a dozen years ago. The deal is this: if you hook up a Fon device to your router and share a segment of your bandwidth wirelessly with others, you become a ‘Fonero’ and you get to use other people’s connections for free when you’re on the move. (In some cases you can also take a cut of the fee non-Foneros pay for using your connection, but that doesn’t seem to be happening here.)

The idea has really taken off when ISPs are involved — ISPs’ terms and conditions tend to forbid the sharing of connections, so it helps when they buy into the idea. BT was the first big win for Fon back in 2007, in an extensive arrangement that also saw the U.K. provider become an investor in Fon.

In the case of Hrvatski Telekom, customers who take up the offer will be gaining access to Fon’s 7.8 million hotspots around the world, and Foneros from elsewhere will now find more places to log on when visiting Croatia.

However, there seems to be no indication of Fon’s network integrating with Deutsche Telekom’s own, extensive hotspot network in quite as deep a way as happened with BT — with the British operator, Fon was so tightly integrated with BT’s OpenZone network that the two services got rebranded as one (BT Wi-Fi) last year. That probably makes the Hrvatski Telekom deal a bit more low-level, like those Fon has struck with other European carriers such as SFR, KPN and MTS.

Still, it’s a first for Deutsche Telekom, and it could very well be the precursor to deeper involvement with the scheme. After all, the German giant has a track record of using its Croatia operations as a testbed, most recently for its TeraStream cloud-based IP network architecture.

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The idea behind Fon is that using the company’s Fonera routers, customers can offer up a small portion of their home internet bandwidth for use with public Wi-Fi spots maintained by the company throughout the world. In exchange for buying a Fonera router and sharing a small fraction of your bandwidth, you get access to Fon’s more than three million worldwide Wi-Fi access points for free, and, once you link your PayPal account, you also make money based on the revenue Fon makes from users buying paid Wi-Fi access via your router’s public hotspot (which the company calls a Fon Spot).

Om mentioned in his piece on the hard truths of Wi-Fi that Fon never anticipated the unique opportunities that the company would glean from the introduction of the iPhone and the connected device revolution it was instrumental in popularizing, but Fon founder Martin Varsavsky went one further, arguing that Fon would not even exist today had it not been for the iPhone, the iPod touch, the iPad, and all the other devices these provided the mold for. “Fon almost went bankrupt until the iPhone came along,” he told me over email.

According to Varsavsky, before the arrival of the iPhone, interest in the Fon model of public Wi-Fi sharing wasn’t sustainable with laptops alone:

So our strategy was failing. We had spent all our funds building our systems and giving Foneras away (through you as well) and there was just not enough interest in Fon. So Fon let go of half of its people, my partners stopped investing. Things were BAD.

Varsavsky believed in the core concept behind Fon so deeply that he wound up funding the company with a personal loan in 2008, determined to stick it out until the company could find its way to profitability. And profitability did come, on the backs of the BT/Fon partnership in the U.K., but more importantly, because the pool of devices that most benefit from available mobile broadband experienced a massive boom. The introduction of iPhones and iPod touches, and later iPads and Android devices, meant that, in Varsavsky’s own words, “Fon became USEFUL.”

The company’s revenues grew from around $5 million in the previous year to about $40 million in 2010, and instead of losing $4 million a year as it did during the worst years, the company started seeing profits of around $4 million in 2010. Varsavsky was able to pay back his loan, and the company looks very strong in 2011, especially now that much of its business comes from selling its routers to mobile network operators in order to help those companies offload 3G traffic. Offloading mobile broadband demand now accounts for much more of Fon’s business than does the consumer side, and cable and fixed operators see Fon as a cheap way to reduce subscriber churn, increase their average revenue per unit and decrease customer acquisition costs, according to Varsavsky. The company’s next move is to gain a major foothold in the U.S. market, something it hopes to achieve thanks to a recent $14 million funding round led by investment fund Atomico.

The impact of the iPhone and devices that followed its example on the Wi-Fi and broadband ecosystem is often explained with charts, figures and graphs, but Fon provides a good look at how it actually affects companies on the ground. The iPhone may not be solely responsible for the sea change when it comes to mobile data usage, but it clearly lead the way and helped galvanize the realization that the future of computing is in the palm of your hand, and companies like Fon couldn’t exist without that realization.

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It’s been some time since I last heard about Fon: the company began by offering free wireless routers to people who are willing to share their home Internet bandwidth. Today, the routers range in cost between $49 and $99, but the concept is the same: a large network is created by regular people who contribute free Wi-Fi for the good of everyone in the Fon community. Normally, sharing of the Wi-Fi signal through Fon routers is completely up to the individual, but in light of the recent events, Varsavaky decided to enable free Wi-Fi for all Fon routers in Japan to help keep people connected.

The decision temporarily open up more than one million hotspots in Japan and took several hours of software changes from Fon’s headquarters in Madrid, Spain. From there, updates were pushed to all of the Fon routers in Japan to enable the open hotspots. In a blog post, Varsavaky expressed condolences to those affected and urged any Fon owners in Japan to plug in their wireless routers to help keep communications and connectivity running. Given that cellular communications have suffered, Wi-Fi may be the best way for the smartphone to keep sharing information between Japan the rest of the world.

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Whisher, a Wi-Fi company that launched with much fanfare at DEMO in January 2007, sold itself to WiFi.com, a hot-spot services company, sometime earlier this year, according to founder and Chief Technology Officer Mike Puchol. The sale came close on the heels of the firing of CEO Ferran Moreno in October 2008. Now while for most companies, such a sale would signal the end of the story, with Whisher it was the start of a new one. As part of its preparation to merge operations with WiFi.com, Whisher launched an internal audit that turned up certain irregularities, which in turn led to a full-blown investigative audit. What it discovered wasn’t good. From a company statement sent to us by Puchol:

“Whisher announces that after a thorough investigation, on April 23rd 2009, it filed a criminal lawsuit against its founder and former CEO Ferran Moreno Blanca, for the alleged offenses of embezzlement, disloyal administration, and falseness in mercantile documents. The lawsuit is also filed against Jesús Roy Solanas for his alleged intervention in the offenses. Whisher confirms that no other party connected with the company was involved in the case, and that the lawsuit has been accepted by the Spanish courts in Barcelona. Ferran Moreno will declare before the courts as defendant on July 1st.”

Wow, what an interesting turn of events for Ferran, who got into an argument with Martin Varsavsky, founder of FON and his former boss, around the time Whisher was launched. Ferran, who was a longtime employee of the Swiss phone company, Swisscom, had championed the idea to his employers, who ended up seed funding the project. But somewhere along the line things got murky, and fake invoices were submitted, first to Swisscom and then to Whisher, Puchol alleges in his email.

I bet we haven’t heard the last of this saga.

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Sprint initiated a temporary reconnection to the Cogent network on Sunday, November 2nd so that customers would have temporary access while longer-term alternate and permanent access options are explored. We emphasize that this reconnection is temporary only, as the core issues in this dispute have not changed. Cogent was notified in advance of the November 2nd reconnection; therefore, any access disruptions occurring during this temporary period are the sole result of a negative reaction instigated by Cogent against the customers of both parties.

Earlier this week when I spoke to Dave Schaffer, CEO of Cogent Communications, he pointed out that Sprint was a tiny fraction of the traffic coming to Cogent network, and the dispute was affecting customers who are single-homed to only the Sprint network, especially those trying to access the Internet from Sprint’s mobile devices.

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Only the FON-ely...FON-liness Of The Long Distance Runner. Yes, I had a whole bank of puns to title this post. They’ll all aptly tragic in telling the tale of a promising piece of web worker infrastructure that has in essence become a network of very lonely and isolated hotspots…

I first came across FON at O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony 2006 conference, as then company evangelist Ejovi Nuwere outlined a vision of a global wifi network built from the grassroots, owned and operated by its users. Ejovi explained that users installing a FON hotspot would be able to earn revenue from its use or, if they agreed to charge no access fee, use every other FON hotspot at no cost when travelling away from home.

A few months later I recieved a complimentary La Fonera router, becoming the 4089th ‘Fonero’ (currently there are 671’363 users). A few days ago, I switched off my La Fonera, packaging it for an eBay bidder that paid just $17. Now the thing is, none of those 671’362 other Fonero’s hotspots were in places I where I needed connectivity…

FON showed great promise, attacking the fragmented wifi hotspot market and placing pressure on 3G broadband providers by harnessing the energy of the very people that would benefit from its service. The promise of a disruptive user-owned global wifi network was a large part of the company’s marketing, playing on the iconography and language of revolution. With $22m in funding from Google, Skype and venture capitalists, the company seemed poised for success…so what went wrong?

• Mobile broadband providers have wised up with 3G plans and hardware available for as little as $20/month here in the UK. Also users have a plethora of reasonable HSDPA and Wifi options. Though, incidentally, O2 won’t be letting UK iPhone 3G users use their phones as modems to the 3G network!

• FON-liness! FON is not where you need it despite their partnerships with telcos and municipalities, I’ve yet to find a FON location when I needed one. Airports, railway stations, gas stations are well served by national wifi providers. These are the location owners FON needed to align with. I’m not going to need broadband parked up outside some guys house, but I’ll need it waiting for a train to London.

• Crazy ass distractions at FON labs with the development of Gmail uploaders, URL squeezers and Facebook status tools are an unneccessary waste of resources. 20% time is only valuable when the other 80% is making a real difference to the business. It also indicates to investors that the founders are bored with the core business of the company.

• Basic hardware has been a constant frustration for Foneros, with the inexpensive La Fonera lacking many features common to Linksys, Belkin and other cheap routers (like more than one port!). Indeed, FON missed a strategic blunder in failing to convince those very manufacturers to add FON-like capabilities to their products out of the box. It can be argued the FON’s firmware is its core asset and proliferating that – agnostic of hardware – was a keystone strategy.

In 2006, I argued that my employers, Orange UK, could partner with FON to create the world’s largest hotzone. My superiors convinced me that if Orange wanted to do that, they could simply upgrade the firmware of all their domestic hotspots – without FON. FON’s potential role as a organisation that could enable roaming between multiple wifi networks was sadly unexplored.

So sadly the promise of FON’s $5 wireless router and it’s community-grown network is almost irrelevant. However, Web workers have many more options available to them. Take my advice and eBay that La Fonera…I’ll be putting that $17 towards an Airport Extreme :)

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Cellular Options:

Mobile phone operators in the United States have been investing billions into building out their mobile broadband networks. Of the four major mobile carriers, three (Sprint/Nextel, Verizon and AT&T) provide high speed mobile broadband to their customers. The little brother of the bunch, T-Mobile, is still only delivering a slow EDGE network to subscribers but are rumored to be rolling out a 3G network soon.

AT&T has a 3G network that uses a technology called High-Speed Download Packet Access (HSDPA) that can support download speeds of 1.8-14.4 Mbit/s. Globally there are 102 HSDPA networks in 55 countries. In the United States, AT&T has rolled out HSDPA to most major metropolitan areas.

You can access HSDPA through specific handsets that support the technology or via USB/PCMCIA cards that plug right into your laptop. Note that not all AT&T handsets support HSDPA, particularly BlackBerrys and the ever-popular iPhone. Yet. These non-3G handsets utilize AT&T’s slower 2.5G EDGE network. HSDPA is quick and speedy, but you pay in lowered battery life.

The cost of 3G data access is in addition to whichever voice plan you have with AT&T, and varies depending on the device you have. To add data access on to your non-smartphone handset, AT&T charges start at $19.99 a month for MEDiaNet access. Data plans for smartphones (BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, etc.) start at around $30/month. To add a data plan for your laptop, you must subscribe to a DataConnect Plan starting at $60/month for 5GB of monthly bandwidth. To use DataConnect, you must have either a USB or PCMCIA data card.

Sprint and Verizon Wireless both support the same 3G networking protocol which is different than HDSPA. These two wireless carriers use a 3G technology called Evolution-Data Optimized or EVDO that comes in two flavors – the faster Rev A and the older Rev. 0. The speedier version (currently used by both Verizon and Sprint), can reach download speeds of up to 2.4MBit/s.

EVDO has been around longer in the US, and as result Verizon and Sprint have more handsets available that use this 3G technology. Also, the reach of Sprint’s and Verizon’s high-speed network is wider. Not only are major metropolitan areas well-covered by EVDO in the US, but access is also available in smaller communities.

Verizon’s data plan, BroadbandAccess, ranges in price from $40/month to $60/month. The less expensive plan allows you a measly 50MB of bandwidth. For the typical web worker, I would recommend the 5GB $60 plan. Sprint, on the other hand, has an unlimited data plan with no caps for $60/month. Alternatively, they feature a less expensive $40/month plan that caps you at 40MB/month.

Cricket (previously covered by WWD) is a low cost cellular service provider that is available in limited areas including Portland, Oregon, Central Texas, Denver, San Diego, and others. Cricket offers EV-DO rev. 0, which is slower than Sprint and Verizon’s EV-DO. However Cricket’s data plan is $35/month for unlimited data usage. If you’re looking for a lower priced option and can work with the slower speeds, Cricket is worth consideration.

If you’re looking to be able to use a broadband data plan for a few days, check out RovAir. They offer cards from AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon for daily rentals.

With these cellular providers, you must check their coverage maps on their respective websites to ensure you’ll have broadband access in your area. Just because you have a cellular signal on your phone does not mean you have 3G/EV-DO network connectivity in that area.

Wi-Fi Options:

If you need Wi-Fi for mobile connectivity, you can rely upon free Wi-Fi hotspots at coffee shops and the like, or pay a subscription fee. To find Wi-Fi hotspots, check out the resources we featured in a previous post.

JiWire is an excellent resource for finding Wi-Fi hotspots around the globe.  In addition to their website locator, the company features downloadable applications for Windows, iPhone, and Mac OS X that will make it easy to find a hotspot.

Are you willing to share a piece of your home Internet connection with others in exchange for access to additional hotspots while on the road?  Fon is a company that sells you a wireless router that will enable you to have a ‘private’ network which is for your own use, and a separate network for fellow Fon users.  Once you’re sharing your network, getting on other Fon wireless hotspots (which are available all around the globe) is free of charge.

For subscription services, there are three major players in the US: T-Mobile, AT&T and Boingo. T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi service is well established and available in many locations. In related news, recently it was announced that Starbucks would eventually ditch T-Mobile in favor of AT&T’s Wi-Fi. AT&T advertises 71,000 places to get online with their subscription service.

T-Mobile’s Wi-Fi service plans start at around $30/month. Please see their website for detailed information. AT&T offers their Wi-Fi subscriptions starting at $20/month for unlimited use. If you’re already an AT&T DSL customer, you get access to AT&T hotspots as a part of your monthly DSL rate. See AT&T’s website for additional program details.

If you’re traveling outside the United States or spend a lot of time in airports, you’re more likely to find access via Boingo Wireless than T-Mobile or AT&T.   Boingo plans start at $22/month for laptops and $8/month for smart phones that feature Wi-Fi capabilities.  With all plans, be sure to read the small print regarding roaming charges.

What method do you use to get online while on the road?

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Whisher, which provides access to Wi-Fi hotspots around the world in exchange for access on users’ own home or business networks, has unveiled a client that allows access to its hotspots on Nokia Symbian (N81, N82 or E61) phones. The move is a smart extension of Whisher’s service offering; Nokia has been including Wi-Fi chipsets in many of its smartphones and has built a strong market share.

To integrate the client (and further lock users into using the Whisher service), the company has introduced a feature called Automatic Connection. When enabled, Automatic Connection scans all Wi-Fi networks within range and connects to the one with the strongest connection. (It’s unclear at this point whether the client would prefer a Whisher network over an open-access network if the two network strengths are equal.)

If you’d like to try the Whisher Wi-Fi sharing system and the associated Symbian client, there are two steps. First, visit Whisher’s web site and download the software appropriate for your home networking set-up (the company has both Windows and Mac clients). Once it’s installed, you’ll be “sharing” on the Whisher network of global Wi-Fi hotspots. Then point your mobile browser to http://nokia.whisher.com and install the Symbian application. After the app is installed, available Whisher hotspots will have a designated “W” icon attached, as pictured on the right.

To see whether the Whisher service has hotspots in the areas you frequent, be sure to view its global map.

The Wisher Wi-Fi network isn’t as far-reaching as the Fon network, but moves like this Nokia agreement — which capitalizes on the E Series and N Series wireless networking capabilities — are proof the company is working to stay competitive. What Wi-Fi roaming service do you use? Would you recommend it?

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