Fon

A very interesting development I completely forgot to record. This happened about 2 months ago, with the launching of the p2p bandwidth sharing startup called fon founded by the famous Argentine entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky. It has this nice idea of sharing broadband internet over wifi for free or paid.

Was totally enthused because of the following - my brother and I had come up with the same model 2 years ago. We had written down a white paper describing the technology and business aspects of it. And neither of us had the time or enthu to follow up and implement it. So, when fon came up, we were very pleasantly surprised that we had an idea of a startup. This is cool. Looking forward to our own in hmmm.... 5 years. hopefully.

Link to the white paper - A Peer-to-Peer Model for Ubiquitous Broadband Connectivity Sharing. and the abstract

Abstract— Over the last few years, there has been an unprecedented growth in residential broadband access, and number of public hotspots. But, the average broadband bandwidth utilization at each home remains low for majority of the
subscribers compared to the bandwidth provided to each. The price of the broadband connection is high, but residents feel the need for it for the infrequent surges in bandwidth demand by some common applications. The public hotspot business model has also not taken off primarily due to additional cost of access for the user outside home, and having to take service from separate hotspot entities.
Peer-to-peer systems have created a storm in recent years, by facilitating robust decentralized systems for file sharing. We envision a peer-to-peer broadband bandwidth sharing system, to address the limitations pointed out in the previous paragraph. In our model, peers with already established broadband connection will share their connection with their neighboring peers either for profit or for altruism. The neighboring peers without broadband access will have on-demand shared broadband access for a low usage-based fee. The system will enable a ubiquitous wireless broadband
connectivity for the peers, by providing access on demand at competitive rates. We back up our technology with details of the business model that will make this competitive bandwidth sharing possible.