Free WiFi With Ads Update

Interesting idea, i wonder if you plan on giving bills part of the ad revenue? but you should make it required that you create a fon account other wise this can lead to bad things...

Would you require a credit card? How do you prevent someone from changing their mac address and reconnecting? It would be annoying (I'm assuming you'd you a captcha to prevent automation), but some might abuse it.

This is a great idea! The only problem that may arise is how will you ensure that they don't watch an add again. If you do it by a FON account they can just create a new FON account each time to get 15 minutes. Thats why I think the tracking should be done by the mac adress, that would ensure people only get one 15 minute trial for watching an add and then become foneros.

All - thank you for the input. All good thoughts. Obviously we need to prevent abuse and we're coming up with a plan to do this. I'll keep you informed of what we come up with.

Changing the MAC address is quite easy too...

Personally, I am a bit skeptic

Please think of the Bills! Fon depends upon them and the Linuses to provide maintenance, bandwidth and locations for Fon's sales. This "ad-supported wifi" *must* come with an incentive for the Bills. Something other than a soft promise like "this may encourage future sales" *roll*.

I think it will work for 95% of the users, and the 5% who try to get around it won't use significant bandwidth.

There used to be a phone card company that gave away free talk time in this way. You listened to a 20 second ad for each 2 minutes of talk time, so you could load it up as high as you wanted by listening to different ads. I like your way better as we are trying to get them to set up their own LaFonera.

15 minutes sure isn't much internet time, so I think they will want their own LaFonera after they use it a few times for free.

Jim

Will this allow 15 minutes of unidentified usage? What will my overview say "15 minutes used by 'Unknown'" ?
I don't want to startup the "security" discussion again, we know FON's point of view, but clearly the idea hasn't even been reviewed for that aspect.

Euronerd - I haven't been directly involved in this project so I don't have a lot of details. I'll see what I can find out and get back to you. It's still in the development stages so nothing is final and all feedback is appreciated.

If your not going to share the ad revenue I am shutting down my router and pulling out of FON.

Techgurl - I think a lot of people feel the way you do. Our intention is to share revenue, this is still in the idea stage so we don't have details yet.

You guys turned this on, and 90% of my sales have become 15 minute promo passes getting me 7 cents a pop!

I'm sitting directly ON TOP of a Starbucks, so this action turned me from roughly $40/month net, to pennies.

The extra router costs me more in electricity now than it generates, and I'm your ideal customer.

Please give me an option to turn this off before I unplug the router. I just received the free antenna too!

-Todd