michel memeteau wrote: > it's totally different , FON is selling people bandwidth , Fon is not selling people bandwidth - Fon is not an ISP. Fon is selling/giving away routers so that people can attach 'hotspots' to their existing broadband connection (typically offered by an ISP without any ties to Fon, and hereby also compromising the contract with the ISP then it is probably not allowed for a private individual to share her/his internet-connection with a generalized public). At the same time - this gives Fon an excellent way of keeping a tap on peoples internet use, then Fon has in the default situation complete control over the system running on the router (which phones-home very often). Furthermore, you as a user/owner of such a Fonera, can then choose to offer the access for free or change money for it .... Meraki is > selling a service for managing your Free (or not) mesh hotspots. > Yes - Meraki is selling a router (and giving away the software to manage it). The Meraki solution is slightly more open (with ssh access and an official serial connector). But, I still believe the end result is quite similar to what Fon is doing (though I have to admit that Meraki has changed it's position quite dramatically across this year - going from being a small open 'startup', to a much more closed company attempting to create a 'blackbox' solution). Both parties, Fon and Maraki, are playing on the creation of a community network, and people don't have to worry about anything - just use it. If you read through the following: http://sf.meraki.com/faq#question_64 it would be a good idea to start wondering: Why is Meraki, as commercial company, so interested in "helping" people build a "community network" (they can't be making a lot of money on selling the Meraki Mini, and definitely not when they are given away for free, such as in San Francisco), and why is Google and Sequoia Capital investing money in both Fon and Meraki? On the other hand - both the Fonera and Meraki Mini are easy to reflash (OpenWrt Kamikaze or Freifunk runs perfectly), so if a company wants to give them away for free (or cheaply) just grab and subvert them :-) -- Gregers Petersen DIIRWB International-Coordinator [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.diirwb.net -- Gregers Petersen DIIRWB International-Coordinator [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.diirwb.net _______________________________________________ wsfii-discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.okfn.org/mailman/listinfo/wsfii-discuss
