A lot of people agree that the reason people unplug their Fon hotspots, is not one on Martin’s list.

I agree with Mike that there is no loss to most of us if we lose our roaming privleges. We could waste a whole day looking for hotspots, and now we have our day back! Also, most of us make no money at all, because noone visits our hotspots.

If there was a strong, thriving community which we felt we belonged to, there would be incentive to stay with Fon, but this is not the case for most of us. I have this blog, and some other Foneros have become employees and beta testers. It’s a psychological thing. The more we have invested in Fon, the more we feel it is important to keep going. This is the same affliction gamblers have.

While I was writing a post on the subject of hardware vs. software based sharing, I did a reality check, and in my opinion, the above is reason #1, which is then combined as a subliminal feeling with any of the other reasons on Martin’s poll, or other reasons given by commenters. Let’s do a quick mix of the three top reasons on his poll:

#1: They can’t find enough roaming. The chances of actually finding a voluntarily shared WiFi network (and I don’t only mean a Fon one) are almost nil, as the penetration of such networks should grow by an order of magnitude to make it a fair chance. Thus, if I unplug my Fonera, do I lose roaming rights that I could actually hope to use? No.

#2: They lose internet access for themselves through the Fonera: I already have my broadband router which my ISP gave me when I signed up, and it already has WiFi built in which actually *does* work with all my gizmos, so why should I go to the trouble of making one extra fixture in the piping work if everything is fine without it? Does my network work better with the Fonera plugged in? No. It may actually work worse due to the extra interference.

#3: They have legal or security concerns: Are the benefits I get from sharing worth the potential legal hassle I can get into from people doing *bad* things on my network? No. (My personal opinion is that there are more chances of being hit by an asteroid than someone using your shared WiFi to commit a crime, but still it cannot be ignored).

Until a compelling reason is found for people to keep an extra box plugged in and using electricity, and go through the trouble of monitoring it to make sure it’s online, and manage to configure it to work with the myriad of possible network combinations out there, custom-hardware based sharing like Fon’s is not IMHO a viable solution. I find it shocking that they have spent over $53 million, and the CEO is still asking questions about why are people not keeping their routers online.

Steven of Amsterdam: the only reason I approved your negative comment was to demonstrate that I am not censoring here. However, you really need to make a counterpoint or provide information, instead of just ambiguously opposing the whole blog post.

This is the comment I submitted on Martin’s blog, let’s see if it’s approved for display.

Great article btw.