Fonera 2 Gets Ready to Shake Up Home Networking

April 6, 2009 by admin
Filed under: Gadgets

Fon, the internet connection sharing company, is on the verge of releasing its second router. The Fonera 2 will go on sale in Europe on April 21st for €50 ($68) and worldwide in May. The official dollar price is to…

Like the original Fon, the principals of the hippy love-in still apply. You buy the router and hook it up as normal. The trick is that the router shares a part of your bandwidth on a public-facing connection. Other Fon owners can login and use this for free. In turn, you — as a Fonera owner — can travel the world and use other Fon-spots. It’s a neat idea and everybody except the money-grabbing telcos wins.

The new version adds even more. You can hook it up to a hard drive and leave it running, pulling down BitTorrent downloads or files from sharing sites like RapidShare and Mega Upload. It does this all without a computer, so once you have it set up you can take your laptop out on the road and look forward to a new episode of Criminal Minds when you get home. It also uses less power than leaving a computer on all day and night — as Fon CEO Martin Varsavky says in the video: “the money you’re saving on the movies, you’re actually spending on electricity.”

More: The USB port means you can hook up hard drives and access them over the network, working as both NAS (Network Attached Storage) but also for backup. We’re not sure if the router works with Apple’s Time Machine software, but as Varsavsky is using a Mac and mentions “Time Machine”, we assume it does.

The Fonera 2 also automatically uploads any videos found in a folder named “YouTube” — just make the folder, pop in the video, plug in the USB drive and walk away.

Enough? No? OK, what about hooking up a USB 3G dongle and sharing the connection over Wi-Fi? That’s exactly what is happening in the video.

This is fantastic, and exactly what a router should be doing. When is the best time for heavy download activity? When you’re out, away from home and not using the connection. What is a router? We see it as a simple translator between us and the outside internet, but it really should be a hub for all our networking needs, including NAS and 3G.

In fact, the only thing the Fonera shouldn’t be used for is as a Wi-Fi hotspot at, say, CES. This January, a certain unnamed Wired.com editor brought his Fon router to set up a network at the Wired nerve-center in the Las Vegas Convention Center. It was only as the show started that we discovered the router would take 24 hours to upgrade its firmware. Luckily, we are nerds and we travel with Ethernet cables.

Fonera 2.0 goes for sale on April 21st in Europe [Martin Vasavsky’s blog]

Fonera 2.0 now works with Rapidshare, Bittorrent, Flickr, you name it [YouTube]

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