Sunday, February 5, 2006
Working with the ISP
The largest concern we have received from our very smart board of advisers is how receptive ISP's will be to FON. Although it's not illegal to share you connection many ISP's have restrictive End User License Agreements (EULA) that prevents you from sharing with anyone outside your household. There are some exceptions to the rule, for example Speakeasy has a very open policy and even goes as far as to encourage FON users to sign up for their service. There are many ISP's that are similar to Speakeasy but the difficulty is with the major incumbents and broadband cable companies that most people use.
To some extent the restrictive EULA's make sense from a business standpoint. The ISP's don't want one person in a building to sign up for broadband and then have his entire neighborhood leech off of it instead of paying. But that isn't an issue with FON. A big part of what I have been doing in the USA is trying to educate ISP's that FON is actually GOOD for their business. And this is why:
We give free roaming to their clients at no expense to the ISP, encouraging more people to sign up with them
We share revenues from aliens with the ISP
FON is a nation of people who share their broadband in exchange for having access to other broadband access points
We are not creating a network of free loaders. This is something that is very important to Martin because he founded Spain's second largest Telecom and ISP companies. So he believes it’s critical to our success to work with ISP's and I think his background has been a great help. We have already signed a deal with one major ISP in Europe and are currently talking to several others. It’s a win/win situation for our foneros and for the ISP's. Soon we hope to have a list of ISP's that explicitly allow FON, until then you should contact your ISP to encourage them to embrace FON.
Posted by Ejovi on Business
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