The newest Wi-Fi router from Fon will add support for networked storage and automatic downloads to its internet-sharing capabilities.
On April 21, Fonera 2 will go on sale in Europe for €50 ($68). It will be available worldwide in May. (The official dollar price still has to be confirmed.)
Like the original Fonera and Fonera+ routers, the principals of this hippie-love-in-styled product still apply. You buy the router and hook it up to your internet connection as normal. The trick is that the router shares a part of your bandwidth on a public-facing connection. Other Fon owners can log in and use this public network for free. In turn, you — as a Fonera owner — can travel the world and use other Fon hotspots. It’s a neat idea and everybody wins, except the money-grabbing telcos.
The new version adds even more. You can hook it up to a hard drive and leave it running, pulling down BitTorrent downloads or files from sharing sites like RapidShare and Mega Upload. It does this all without a computer, so once you have it set up you can take your laptop out on the road and look forward to a new episode of Criminal Minds when you get home. It also uses less power than leaving a computer on all day and night. As Fon CEO Martin Varsavky says in the video, with computer-based overnight downloads, "the money you’re saving on the movies, you’re actually spending on electricity."
More: The USB port means you can hook up hard drives and access them over the network, working as a NAS (network attached storage) device as well as for backup of your computers’ data. We’re not sure if the router works with Apple’s Time Machine software, but as Varsavsky is using a Mac and mentions "Time Machine" in his video, we assume it does.
The Fonera 2 also automatically uploads any videos found in a folder named "YouTube" — just make the folder, pop in the video, plug in the USB drive and walk away.
Enough? No? OK, what about hooking up a USB 3G dongle and sharing the connection over Wi-Fi? That’s exactly what is happening in the video.
This collection of features is fantastic, and exactly what a router should be doing. When is the best time for heavy download activity? When you’re out, away from home and not using the connection. What is a router? We see it as a simple translator between us and the outside internet, but it really should be a hub for all our networking needs, including NAS and 3G.
In fact, the only thing the Fonera shouldn’t be used for is as a Wi-Fi hotspot at, say, CES. This January, a certain unnamed Wired.com editor brought his Fon router to set up a network at the Wired nerve-center in the Las Vegas Convention Center. It was only as the show started that we discovered the router would take 24 hours to upgrade its firmware. Luckily, we are nerds and we travel with Ethernet cables.
Interestingly, some progressive European telcos actually like Fon, because it enforces
reciprocal sharing, rather than freeloading — which means that Fon
users have to pay for their own internet service at home if they want
to use the Fon network abroad. We’ll see if they take the same benevolent attitude towards the Fonera 2, which also encourages heavy use of both the upstream and downstream components of the bandwidth they supply.
Fonera 2.0 goes for sale on April 21st in Europe [Martin Vasavsky’s blog]
Fonera 2.0 now works with Rapidshare, Bittorrent, Flickr, you name it [YouTube]
See Also:
- FON Offers Free Routers To San Franciscans
- Open Source Wi-Fi Service Claims Ten Million Hotspots In Network …
- Fon and BT in Internet Sharing Love-In
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