Quite a few people have heard of Fon, the service where you get a special Fonera router which you can open to others, and in exchange you can use their Foneras wherever you are.

Well, in Finland one phone network operator has set up a similar service called Wippies, where you get a free Wippies router which you open to others in exchange for access to other Wippies routers. I've just done a story about it on a site I work for:

http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/news/...k_operator.php

At the moment it's only available in Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Estonia, but it's been expanding steadily (it was originally Finland-only) and the Wippies map shows one or two routers in France, Spain and elsewhere which might indicate further expansion areas.

The main reason I was mention this though is the fact it's being run and paid for entirely by a mobile phone network operator.

When I hear the horror stories about US phone network operators, I can't help but contrast it with how the Finnish networks behave. Finnish phone networks see themselves as mobile ISPs, they don't care which device you use, they don't care what you do with your connection, they don't lock you down in any way. All they care about is that you pay your phone bill, you don't even have to sign a contract.

Now here's Saunalahti, a Finnish network operator, going even further by actively giving away free wi-fi routers which let you make free VOIP calls all over the country and in other countries too. They don't apparently care if it harms their revenues from phone bills, although I'm still wondering what exactly they do intend to get out of this in the long term.

It cost's 2 euro/hour to use Wippies Wifi if you are non member. At least that's what they're getting; ubiquitous commercial wifi coverage. Or they are trying to get, wifi doesn't really work very well because routers are placed in apartments and potential paying customers are out in the street.

Are you sure about the 2 euro thing? I couldn't find anything on the Wippies website even mentioning non-member access, though that does make sense, and it's what Fon is trying to do. It's still very surprising for a phone network to do this though.

Is there any chance this idea could be done with Wimax routers in the future? That would presumably make the coverage issue less important.

You have to try it before you see the prices. I even paid it once There were other price/time combinations too, it is very comparable to fifiwifi pricing.

But there were no instructions about even trying it, the entire site just talks about setting up the homeboxes.

How exactly do you try it as a non-member, and how did you find out how non-members try it?

find a wippies router and connect to it's open wlan

This is the part I never understood, how do I know it's a wippies router?

According to the map there are several wippies routers near me, but I don't see anything called "wippies" on the list of nearby access points.

oh, in that case it's hard to understand my gibberish

Wippies routers are have SSID "Wippies VOIP", "Wippies something" etc. Every Wippies router have 3 SSID's (if I recall correctly) and one of those is open for (paying) public.

Your experience show that Wippies and Fon like systems are not really making any good for wifi coverage, because home routers are placed in apartments. Weak transmission power and thick walls and nothing works

But if you happen to live in Helsinki, I have used wippies near Finnair Stadium and have seen good signal stength Kauppatori, but no promises

Hmm.. 'Wippies' won't go down well in the Netherlands where 'wippie' means 'quickie' in the naughty sense.

So if a Wippies connection is open it should say "Wippies whatever" on the list of connections? And if I can't see any like that then they aren't within range?

I did look up some of the discussion of range on the Wippies forum, and it seemed to vary quite a lot. Some people could get the connection in the middle of the street, while others couldn't even get it in the next room.

Like I mentioned earlier in the thread, maybe in the future this could be done with Wimax routers for better range? But maybe the ISPs wouldn't like that...


Oh dear

That reminds me of an Indian car company called Reva which wanted to introduce its cars to Europe. Reva in Finnish means... erm... something you'd find between your legs (well, some people would).