Another one of those Interesting Things Which You Might Not Have Noticed: the Finnish phone network operator Saunalahti has a service called Wippies with the same idea as Fon. You order a free Wippies Wi-Fi router which lets all Wippies members access your home connection wirelessly, and you can access theirs, with the aim of building a free nationwide or worldwide service. It was initially just an experiment in Finland last year, but it's now expanding to cover other countries, with Sweden, Denmark, Spain and most recently Estonia joining the network.
Read on in the full article.
Saunalahti, gongratulations on the free plugging.
Saunalahti, gongratulations on the free plugging.
I can assure you I have no connection to Saunalahti at all, I just thought the expansion was an interesting development in this experiment. We never mentioned Wippies when it started out last year.
As I said in the article, it's interesting to see a phone network doing this kind of thing, when most networks around the world seem to be just burying their heads in the sand about wi-fi VOIP.
In any case, I'm still not sure what Saunalahti hope to actually gain from Wippies. Some people have suggested they will charge for access to non-members, but there's no mention of that on the Wippies website. They might introduce it in the future of course...
krisse wrote: Some people have suggested they will charge for access to non-members, but there's no mention of that on the Wippies website.
Yeah, the website isn't exactly the most uptodate/user friendly/well maintained. (Huge, quick-ish expansion with too few people employed on the project?)
But I can confirm that at least in Finland the pay-for-access works. Whenever you connect to an open wippies wlan your browser is routed/captured/whatever it is called to a wippies portal page where you can either log in with your wippies userID, OR pay for access by sending an SMS (costing a few euros for a few hours) with a code (specific to that wippies' box).
How or if this model works/will work in other countries I have no idea - the model of paying for services by SMS is limited by the operators cooperating, is it not?