Have you heard about this new WiFi network called FON? It’s a community-driven network of hotspots in Spain (and now branching out to the US) that aims to build up a wide-area network of WiFi hotspots that will hopefully be able to serve a whole municipality or city. What’s great is that FON is backed by Google and Skype, the most well-known tech companies in the fields of web search and VoIP, respectively.

FON basically works just like the other similar endeavors we wrote on earlier—they ask users to sign up with an account, and open up their home or office WiFi routers or access points for use by the rest of the subscriber base. Users can then “roam” across the WiFi hotspots of other FON users (called FONeros) for free. It’s a concept of sharing the wireless access and the broadband connections as well.

For now, one limitation of FON is that it only works with Linksys WRT 54G routers. But what’s good is that FON is in deals with Linksys and is selling WRT 54G routers to participants at a highly discounted price of US$ 25.00. FON will come up with software for installing on other brands and models of WiFi routers or access points, so the FONero network can expand elsewhere.

I think this is a great solution to establishing a wide-area WiFi network. If the big companies can’t do it themselves, it might be good to instead deputize private citizens, and ask them to share the bandwidth, which is mostly in excess for a regular household anyway. What’s great is that work is decentralized–there are no servers and network infrastructure to maintain.

With Google and Skype backing FON, I think the brand-name recognition alone would give great mileage to this worthy endeavor.