This week I decided to go to visit my good friend Andrew in the Netherlands over week-end. I like this country, Amsterdam much of the other places here, but I always come to stay at home my friends in Eindhoven.
It was so nice to talk to them the last changes in my life, and also to hear how's their live evolving! And for sure the first thing I had to do as soon as we get a pause the evening, is to check my e-mail since I was waiting for some important news to arrive. So I plugged my laptop, received the ugly news from Andrew that he does not have a wi-fi network at home, and therefore I asked him if he knows there are some close neighbors that have FON? It's true that I hate dealing with network cables since you loose your movement freedom, and also for me it was not important if to use Andrew's ADSL of somebody else's shared connection.
- WHAT IS FON??? Andrew asked me...
Well, I believe there are people that do not know FON, but they should be all out of IT sector I was supposed. But Andrew works in high-tech so it was a nice surprise for me! Having explained to Andrew the idea of FON (it's the worldwide wifi routing service for the registered Users and in the future probably a Google-analyzed User Profile for e-Bay [potential]clients, that was enough to impress my friend) and the achievements of FON Network deployment effort, my friend has confirmed that it should be a great idea, but will make sense, on his opinion, only for the big cities like Milan and crazy countries as Italy (just my example :lol:).
“Holland is different, Holland is pacific”!
Well, we went to the FON Maps portal and discovered that there are 3 other people living 500...1000 meters from the house of Andrew and they have FON! ;) I know Andrew lives not in such a city center and it's not the overcrowd here, however there were few FONeros and 3 of them very near us! Also we checked the FON nodes over Eindhoven and ... get that Holland is NOT really different from Italy!
FON is EVERYWHERE! :) And that's nice!
Now my friend, as soon as his requested on registration as FONero is executed, will be able on his road from home to his office be “almost always” on-line with his GSM/wi-fi communicator (that has good wi-fi and full package of Internet communication tools, including Skype). Also it seems that in the city center Andrew will not need to pay money anymore for GSM calls to his friends, but to call through Skype everywhere (he is a heavy user of Skype that's why the “discovery” of FON is so important for him)?
P.S. Having this nice chat and while navigating on FON Maps over Milan, I've moved my eyes to Segrate side, the place where I live in Italy, and found there are TWO NEWS users since the last time I checked the map (it was 2 weeks ago). It's my personal hint for the others- to have a JPG shapshoot of my nearest locations taken from the FON Maps service, and I always know where to go for Internet when I walk/bike in the city.
Keywords: Andrew Issaenko, Eindhoven, Italy, Netherlands, Segrate, FON
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