In April, innovative Spanish router maker FON launched the La Fonera 2.0 router overseas. Last week, FON announced the router here in the United States, calling it the “Fonera 2.0n”.
Retailers will begin selling the 2.0n router beginning in October for $99. As the name suggests, the router supports 802.11n, which is scheduled to be finalized in September.
The FON hook is the fact that it creates two parallel Wi-Fi connnections, one reserved for your private use, and the other open to the public. If you own a La Fonera router, therefore, those public channels are open to you when you travel, and your router is also available as a public hotspot for your FON buddies.
FON also claims that the new router contains an advanced processor that will help it sync connected applications running in the background, instead of waiting their turn for a single channel.
Some users might also be interested in the router’s ability to process some BitTorrent torrents (RapidShare and MegaUpload are specifically named) while saving the downloaded content to a user-supplied USB hard drive that can connect to the integrated USB hub. I was a bit worried about this when I talked to Hitachi about their $79 SimpleNAS device that transforms a USB drive into a NAS; it’s not clear whether the La Fonera requires you to reformat the drive or not. Still, for just $20 more, you’re getting a lot more functionality. You can also use the software to turn a 3G dongle into a shared Wi-Fi connection, according to FON.
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