FON

FON is an ambitious public service project aiming to spread free WiFi across Europe. Started by Martin Varsavsky, the man behind two of Spain's largest telecom companies: Jazztel and Viatel, FON will use the Wi-Fi infrastructure already in place across Europe and allow anyone with a laptop to access it for free. FON's downloadable software client installs into your Wi-Fi base station, giving you a password of your choice but also accepting all the other passwords of all the other FON members. "FON is based on the premise that Wi-Fi users are only taking advantage of 3% of their capacity on the average or in other words wasting 97% of their total paid for bandwidth." Varsavsky has pledged millions of euro of his own money to buy software and ad campaigns to achieve his goal, and is currently looking for people interested in working with him.