FON Wireless Router

A few weeks ago I signed up with FON to get a cheap wireless router, unlike many on the FON Community Boards, my router turned up altough it did have a 2 pronged european plus I was able to get an adapter quite easily.

Once I had registered the router I was then asked by the FON website to upgrade to FONBasic 0.6.6 which failed and turned the router into a rather ugly paper weight.

I eventually got the router working again by installing OpenWRT and then installing the FONBasic firmware. I then found out that the FONBasic software disabled the private encrypted Wireless port which was enabled when I first got the router. I was also having a lot of difficulties with maintaining connections to the internet long enough to download podcasts or play games.

I have now downgraded the firmware to FONAdvanced 0.6.0 which does not seem to be an officially supported version any more but it is much more stable. I don't intend to upgrade the firmware again until the v1.0 and on condition that v1.0 has got multiple SSIDs reenabled.

It's a shame because the idea of FON is great, but the company behind it got greedy and have tried to do far far far too much with too few employees, FON should have restricted the number of routers that they were sending out, they should have employeed people to work on their Customer Support email address and most of all, they should have tested the firmware before releasing to the general public.

I know there are some people on the FON Community Board who argue that since FON firmware is Beta, we should have expected some problems but a public beta should not be so flakey that most of it's users are downgrading to unsupport versions of the firmware because it's both more stable and has better features.

Categories: Personal_ Tech_

Technorati Tags: Wireless, Router, FON