Bagel Belly Blog

Fon not so much fun

So my free Fon wireless router arrived on Friday, and I've just got round to trying it out. It's been something of a mixed experience, and not the smooth and simple setup I was hoping for by a long shot.

From a hardware perspective, La Fonera is pretty cool. Sleek and white and smaller than any other similar device (though with an external power supply, so overall not quite as elegant as the Airport Express). You can see comparison pictures in the Fon flickr set.

According to the instructions, the first step is to plug it in and connect to the public FON_AP access point. Since I was toying with ways of setting up the network, I shared my Powerbook's internet connection and plugged the Fon into that. Unfortunately, I couldn't see the public access point (the private one was visible though). I tried plugging the fon directly into the cable modem, but still couldn't see the access point.

After many minutes of troubleshooting, it seems there are two problems: the FON_AP access point is only visible when the Fon is happy it has an external connection, and the cable modem is really sluggish in handing out DHCP leases. Once the Fon finally got a connection, I was able to visit the Fon router registration page.

Sadly, the Fon router registration page was crawling at a snail's pace. I managed to fight my way through the molasses to register, and was told I'd receive an email to confirm the registration - but as that hasn't arrived yet, I assume their mail server is having the same problems as the web server.

The next step should have been to connect to the private access point, but I could not get the Macbook to connect. Every time I entered the WPA password I would get the incorrect password error message. Out of curiosity, I tried it on the Powerbook, which worked first time. This at least allowed me to do some Googling to discover others had this problem (fon blog, Oliver Thylmann's Thoughts). The workaround of forcing the Macbook to use WEP didn't work, but connecting to http://192.168.10.1/ and manually changing the Private WiFi settings to use WEP and to specify a key seemed to do the trick.

So now I'm connected via the Fon, and it seems to be working ok. All in all, it wasn't the happy simple experience I was hoping for, and if I had this much difficulty, I can't really see masses of people rushing out to install Fons. But then, I'm renowned for being the bug finder from hell, so perhaps others have a much better experience than me.

I'm looking forward to being able to access all the other Fon hotspots around the world for free.