My FON Router is Online
When coming back from this particular trip, I had four boxes waiting for me–three from Amazon.com and one box from FON. Packed inside was a Linksys WRT54GS flashed with FON’s firmware (and $13 US for that router delivered to your home is a fantastic deal). Following the enclosed instructions, I registered my FON router and now I am officially a “linus,” which allows me to access any other FON access point for free. Unfortunately, there’s not too many FON access points around these parts, but I like the idea of being able to use a FON access point for free if I happen to stumble across one in my travels.
One thing I found annoying about the process is that while they did have the most recent firmware loaded, in order to be able to control your access point from the FON portal, you have to reflash it with the “FONBasic” firmware. Not a huge deal, but it would have been nice if that version of firmware were loaded from the getgo.
One other thing that’s nifty is that you can also set up a few “friends and family” accounts on your FON router. This allows you to make it so that a few select people can utilize your access point without having to be a FONero–i.e. a member of the FON service. It’d be nice if you could add certain MAC addresses to the router so they weren’t prompted for authentication, but I guess you can spoof MAC addresses so that’s probably not the most fantastic idea.
