I've been using FON with Time Warner since July '06 so I suppose this is a moot point for me. I didn't join FON for the "FON community" but instead for the cheap (and hackable) router, which was a modded Linksys WRT that they subsidized to less than ten bucks with shipping (I haven't hacked it yet). Now they have their own 'Fonero' router model. It seems to me that Time Warner wants to co-op, or at least stave off, the growth of free municipal wireless that Google has already offered to San Francisco (http://tinyurl.com/ba9sk) and probably has threatened to expand if the telecom/cable Co's don't take Net Neutrality seriously. Never mind the other, ad-supported, forms of free wireless internet (Whatsup, 'M2Z' : http://tinyurl.com/2rby3w ; Whatsup, 'Anacapa' : http://tinyurl.com/22697z) that also threaten the traditional business model of internet/communications delivery. I mean, if you can't beat 'em, buy 'em off, right?
Oh yea, don't forget WiMax as a viable skip over cable/dsl service. (Whatsup, ClearWire - just wikipedia 'Clearwire'). It seems as though this multitude of new-model ISP start-ups will fight the traditional telcos in a style akin to Gulliver's Travels: tying down a sleeping giant with a hundred little ropes.
Also, Google was one of the first companies to give significant venture-capital to FON, and still does. I wonder if Time Warner knows this...Perhaps they do, and FON is a small flashpoint, a proxy war if you will, in the growing cold war between content providers and telcos first begun by net neutrality. Maybe I'm being a little too melodramatic over the delivery of data packets. Sorry for the long post.
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I've been using FON with Time Warner since July '06 so I suppose this is a moot point for me. I didn't join FON for the "FON community" but instead for the cheap (and hackable) router, which was a modded Linksys WRT that they subsidized to less than ten bucks with shipping (I haven't hacked it yet). Now they have their own 'Fonero' router model.
It seems to me that Time Warner wants to co-op, or at least stave off, the growth of free municipal wireless that Google has already offered to San Francisco (http://tinyurl.com/ba9sk) and probably has threatened to expand if the telecom/cable Co's don't take Net Neutrality seriously. Never mind the other, ad-supported, forms of free wireless internet (Whatsup, 'M2Z' : http://tinyurl.com/2rby3w ; Whatsup, 'Anacapa' : http://tinyurl.com/22697z) that also threaten the traditional business model of internet/communications delivery.
I mean, if you can't beat 'em, buy 'em off, right?
Oh yea, don't forget WiMax as a viable skip over cable/dsl service. (Whatsup, ClearWire - just wikipedia 'Clearwire').
It seems as though this multitude of new-model ISP start-ups will fight the traditional telcos in a style akin to Gulliver's Travels: tying down a sleeping giant with a hundred little ropes.
Also, Google was one of the first companies to give significant venture-capital to FON, and still does. I wonder if Time Warner knows this...Perhaps they do, and FON is a small flashpoint, a proxy war if you will, in the growing cold war between content providers and telcos first begun by net neutrality.
Maybe I'm being a little too melodramatic over the delivery of data packets. Sorry for the long post.