Fon today announced it has surpassed three million hotspots worldwide. With 3.35 million hotspots to-date, Fon has grown by more than 200% year-on-year and has extended its lead as the world’s largest WiFi network, well ahead of its main competitor Boingo, a WiFi aggregator that currently hosts 211,000 hotspots. Fon revenues have also grown significantly, ending 2010 with €28 million, up from €5 million the year before. Fon attributes its growth to the surge in use of WiFi devices, and attributes its giant lead over other networks to its free WiFi proposition. Fon lets users connect to WiFi at Fon hotspots anywhere in the world for free in exchange for sharing a bit of Fon WiFi at home.
“Fon now has well over three million hotspots; that’s triple our size just one year ago, and about six times larger than the Boingo, iPass and T-Mobile WiFi networks all combined,” said Martin Varsavsky, Fon’s founder and CEO. “As many more people purchase tablets and smartphones in the coming year, and as operators choose Fon WiFi to offload the fifty-fold increase in data traffic these users are expected to generate by 2015, we expect our community to continue to grow with no end in site.”
Fon produces 802.11n Fonera WiFi routers that when connected ADSL/broadband make it possible to safely broadcast two powerful, dedicated WiFi signals. One signal is encrypted and private. The other signal is public and accessible via password to registered members of the Fon community. Fon also builds its WiFi technology directly into its Telco partners’ CPEs.
You can become a member by buying a Fonera once or by opting in to the Fon service for free, courtesy of a Telco partner. Partners include BT, MTS (Comstar-UTS) Russia, SFR France, SoftBank Japan and ZON Portugal. Non-members can connect to the Fon network buy purchasing affordable access passes
