Last Monday, I wrote about my new Macbook and its difficulty connecting to my 2wire 1800 HG wireless network. That same day, I received an email from an employee at Fon. He offered me a free router from them. I was really psyched for two reasons. One, it’s a free router that I really needed because tugging an ethernet cable around with your Macbook sucks, and two, because Fon is truly amazing.

Fon bascially offers routers but with an interesting twist. Let’s first check out the Fon router. They call it La Fonera. The router is absolutely tiny. I think it’s even smaller than the Airport Express.

This, compared to my 2wire router, is ridiculously small, and easy to transport. I can see bringing this thing along with me to a hotel room and making a little wi-fi connection in my room. La Fonera is very simple. It has 2 ports on the back. One is for power and the other is an ethernet port. The antenna also exits from the back.

Setup is dead simple. Plug in power. Plug in ethernet port. In my case, I plugged in an ethernet cord that was connected to my 2wire router. This let’s me have the wifi originating from my room for great reception. Once you plug both cables in, La Fonera will start connecting. The power light will go green, and then it will start getting the internet connected and broadcasting. Within a minute I was online on my Macbook. It automatically saw the available wifi and hopped on. I couldn’t have been happier. There was absolutely no way to screw this setup up.

With a dead simple setup, a tiny form factor and a slick look, there’s no question the La Fonera router is a great purchase.

A few things to point out that are unfortunate. The router has no extra ethernet ports. There is no way to output internet from this device other than through wifi. Also, I found that I could not get connection in the room farthest from my bedroom. It is a pretty long distance, so it’s probably not something specific with the router, just a long distance. But, Fon has a solution for this. They offer an antenna extender that let’s you boost your wireless signal significantly.

One thing I didn’t see in the instruction manual, but might be cool, would be to be able to pick up a wirless sigal from a different router and then broadcast it’s own wireless signal from that. I think that would be a very cool feature, and some routers can do that.

I haven’t mentioned the best feature of Fon yet. Fon is a community, and when you buy a Fon router, you not only get wireless access around your house, you get wireless access around the world. Every Fon router broadcasts two signals, a public one and a private WPA-encrypted one. If you own the router you can do go through the secure connection to protect unwanted guests from reading your packets, but if a friend’s browsing around at your house, and you don’t want to have to configure his computer with the wireless password, he can hop on the public network. Also, people living around your house will be able to use your wifi publicly. The whole idea about Fon is wireless access everywhere.

That really is the part I dig about Fon. The community aspect of wifi is a great idea, and they’ve implemented it very well. You can even make money through Fon. When modifying settings, you can choose whether you want to be a “Linus” or a “Bill.” Linus will broadcast your internet for free while Bill will charge people to get on, and you get half the profits. Since I don’t care about people piggybacking off my wifi, and find the community aspect to be the quintessential part of Fon, I made my network a Linus. I should also state that Fon members can connect to Fon networks around the world for free always.

I really like their idea and have to give them props for finding the best way to cover the world in free wifi. Just use the wifi that’s already there. Very clever.

So give them a look and come stop by my house for some free wifi.