My FON router showed up in the mail yesterday, so now I’m officially a Fonero.

If you aren’t familiar with the FON movement, it’s a group that aims to provide wireless Internet access for everyone – provided that they share their own Internet connection. So if you’re a FONero, you can connect through any other FON access point all around the globe and connect to the Internet. This isn’t a replacement for your current ISP, you still need to pay for the Internet connection your FON router is connected to – but it IS free wireless Internet when you’re out of town and can find a FON access point. There are some limitations depending on how the person decided to share their connection, but that’s the basics of it.

My father in law mentioned it to me, and it sounded like a neat idea. Considering I’m in Lincoln, NE there probably won’t be many other FONeros connecting through my AP.

FON customizes the firmware on the Linksys router to use their own DNS server and to restrict access by first redirecting users to a FON login page, similar to the method used by many hotels to restrict their free Internet access to only paying patrons.

Cool idea. We’ll see if I can get wireless wherever I’m at now.