FON is a shared WiFi service. Couple of years ago they gave their routers for free in Finland, and since then I've been sharing my home connection with other FON users. And occasionally I've even roamed using FON connectivity provided by other users, using Devicescape to log my Internet Tablet automatically to the network.

Now FON has released Fonera 2.0, which can support OLPC's mesh networking technology. This means that the FON routers can share each other's connection so not each of them has to have a direct connection to some ISP. Also it means that peer-to-peer connections within the mesh network can happen directly, bypassing the wider internet completely.

If mesh networking became popular, it could provide an important part of a free software -compatible cloud:

• Mesh network for internet connection sharing and direct connectivity between users
• XMPP and Telepathy for enabling peer-to-peer collaboration in applications
• Content repositories for replicating data between application instances and users

Meraki is another WiFi access point provider that supports mesh networking.

Via Boing Boing.

Technorati Tags: mesh, p2p, fon