A friend of mine pointed out that Martin Varsavsky is thinking of how to combine WiFi mobile phones with his FON movement.
It really depends on what he has in mind. Is it to turn the phone into a FON bases station? The wifi on the phone doesn’t actually work in that manner, as far as I can tell (I have an N93).
The WiFi is really only for the phone to connect to a WiFi network. If anyone were to connect to the phone, I am pretty sure that the phone would not be able to tunnel that to the 3G network – so no badwidth sharing, really.
Hence, there may two ways at least to approach this:
1 – make the WLAN phone FON-friendly, such that it connects to FON basestations easily and provides all the FON services to the phone.
2 – make the phone FON-friendly such that the phone can share its 3G connection via WiFi. Eh, there are cost issues and such, but it would be interesting to share bandwidth in this way. Normally, the phone will share bandwidth with one device over bluetooth. Here, you could have multiple WiFi devices sharing the phone’s bandwidth.
So, it comes back to what he has in mind.
Martin?
Link [via Dirk H]: Martin Varsavsky | English.
Does anyone know how we could port FON functionality say chillispot into a Symbian 3G/WiFi phone like the N80? If so please write to me. I see a great potential in taking the Fon Movement into mobile phones and have 3G to WiFi converters. Just look at the WiFi Alliance site and see how many gadgets have WiFi while there are almost no gadgets that are not phones with 3G.
What I would like to be able to do is to have something similar to the Fon functionality that we obtain in Linux with http://www.openwrt.org in Symbian phones. My phones the Nokias N80 and E61 have wifi that works as station wifi, but through software changes I am hoping that the wifi radio could be made to work as an access point. The idea here is that you could receive 3G and send wifi. Apple computers can do that now for example, they get 3G through a Vodafone card for example and send wifi. Also you could do a bluetooth version of this, you could receive bluetooth connections and because you have a flat rate 3G rate you let your friends call and access the internet for free, or you charge them a little, that could also be Fon. The concept of Fon is to turn devices which are meant to provide radio signal to one person to many persons and then the foneros can imagine whatever they want to do.
I see no reason why you couldn’t make a phone into a basestation to share bandwidth in any permutation – BT-WiFi for non-WiFi devices, WiFi-3G for non-cellular devices, etc.
Now that I think of it, do you know that you can run Apache on S60? I haven’t played with it, and some of the use cases are not clear to me (my head is in the lower-end mass-market phones), but you might be able to play with it and do exactly what you are looking for.
Here’s the link to the code. It’s open source:
http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/mobile-web-server/index.html