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Posts: 255 | Thanked: 15 times | Joined on Oct 2007 @ United Kingdom
#15
Originally Posted by Texrat View Post
rs-px, I agree with you philosophically. I just see so much inertia against ubiquitous wifi, even something like FON. I would love to see an organic grassroots effort at creating that democratic wifi infrastructure, but I fear the Maintainers of the Almighty Status Quo will succeed in damaging it if not killing it outright somehow (just watch the industry-whoring FCC find some sort of fault with FON).

Just look how telcos twisted the debate over net neutrality: their spin doctors managed to co-opt the debate entirely and flip the positions to where it appeared net neutrality advocates were the ones wanting a gated internet! The public is too technically ignorant to know any better and too sheepish to learn enough to fight this sort of crap. All they want is a connection, and if the telcos provide it at a price just short of fatal, regardless of how painful, they'll take it.

I want extradomestic wifi to live long and prosper, but it looks to me like FON or no FON, it's losing momentum...
I think there's a real US/Europe divide in our outlooks and observations I'm in the UK, by the way.

Maybe FON is more likely to succeed in Europe and South America because we're more amenable to *cough* communistic ideas like FON In Europe, corporations have far less lobbying power (unless you want to start spinning conspiracy theories).

But if the Internet proves anything, it is that users can't be forced into anything. AOL and Microsoft would have liked to own the Web back in 1997, via their portals, and many predicted they would do so. But they failed.

If people currently use per-minute 3G data access, it's almost certainly because nothing better is available.

Plus, I don't see how FON can be stopped. The routers are cheap, and that's all you need to get involved. Here in the UK you don't even have to buy a new router if you already have a BT Broadband router (and BT is probably the latest ISP in the country). BT has altered the firmware of all its routers to be FON compatible.