You have probably heard of FON, they are a company that basically organizes a world-wide WIFI community. You goto their website, sign up, purchase a router, and when you get it activate it and share wifi. There are three types of users in the FON community: Aliens, Bills, and Linus. The aliens are people that are signed up for FON but don't yet run their own access point. The aliens pay for wireless access on FON access points. The bills, are users that have a FON WIFI access point, but share in the income that FON recieves for aliens using their access point. The bills have to pay to use other people's FON access points. Finally we have the linus, a FON user that has a access point, and doesn't share in the income. The linus can freely use other FON community members access points. The linus is the way most people go when they sign-up for FON, simply because most ISPs don't care when you share bandwidth as long as you don't sell it. The exception to this rule is Speakeasy. They actually encourage reselling. Usually when you sign up for FON you have to pay $29.99 for their hardware. I got an e-mail a couple of weeks back saying that if I enter such and such code in he checkout that I could get one scott free. I figured what the hell. So I did it. Anyways, enough of an explaination about what FON is and how I got it, lets get to the goodies, the hardware they practically give away. Before I got it, I decided to check out on the net what exactly I was getting. The following is whats in the little box, from what I gathered:

La Fonera

• Dimensions: 93.5 mm x 25.5 mm x 70 mm (without antenna)
• CPU: Atheros Mips Big Endian: 170 mhz
• Memory:
• Flash: 4Mb
• SDRAM: 16Mb
• Port: 1 ethernet port (10/100 Mbps)
• Antenna Connector: RP-SMA connector (reverse SMA)
• Antenna: Omni-Directional (2dBi)
• Encryption: WEP 64bit/128 bit, WPA, WPA2, WPA mixed

Not a bad little router for nothin. Although at this time its only good for what FON intends it for, or maybe a repeater with some hacking. No major firmware has been ported to the Atheros cpu, and even at that the firmware is encrypted on la fonera. On the next page we get to see what this thing looks like, inside and out.