A few weeks ago I signed up to receive a free FON wifi router. FON’s concept is simple, build a community of users willing to share their bandwidth through an open Wifi connection. The only problem is it requires purchasing a $30 wifi router from FON. Well, that was until they ran a promotion to hand out a few thousand free routers. I filled out a form and didn’t expect much. FON literally asked me for only my name and address.

To my surprise I received a little package this week. Sure enough, I had been sent a little FON wifi router. The router itself is nothing too impressive. It’s small enough to fit in the palm of my hand and has three LED status lights on it. All I needed to do was to plug it in to my existing wired network.

The router uses the OpenWRT firmware originally created to run on Linksys hardware. I thought this was pretty ingenious of FON. By utilizing existing software they are able to provide some pretty slick functionality. The router has a public and private side. The private side can be used for a secure internet connection like any other wifi router. The public side, though, is a proxy into the FON community.

When I first set up the router I was redirected to FON’s website to configure the router to work with the community. I had to choose what type of node I wanted to be. My choices were either 1. be free and then be granted access to other community routers or 2. charge people $3 to connect to my router. Being in a suburb and right next to a Caribou with free internet connectivity I can’t imagine making much money off of it. I choose to be a free node.

So, if you’re ever cruising the streets of Crystal looking for free wifi, check out my drive way. It’s got the best there is to offer…in a driveway.