La Fonera (FON) - spare your wireless, earn your unlimited wifi!

FON Project official site
Taiwan FON organization

I've just got my FON received from express. This FON ap is a rather smaller one, and featuring in 2 SSID(public / private) accessible entry of WiFi. Comparing to the earlier version released in the exposition held in early December of 2006, this version have a Traditional Chinese manual in addition(maybe more additional? I can't sure.)

With the fully updated firmware, I encountered much less problem then the former user did. With zh-TW language supported firmware, and Chinese version manual, it is much easier to install then before.



Setting up the hardware is quite easy, just use the connection wire connect between the hub(or ADSL router directly) and FON AP itself, and don't forget the AC Adapter =).








The accessories within. Including 4 sticker tags, a manual CD(in fact, it requires no installation disk), a multi-language manual, and a Traditional Chinese manual(Taiwan only =) ) . Indeed, the cat is so cute to play the rule of symbolization of FON.







There are 3 indicator LED on the surface of FON, respectively as WLAN, Internet and Power. But I encountered problem when access the wireless, and the WLAN indicator was blinking. I cant sure if it was not compatible with my wireless adapter of my NB, but login was so difficult. By the default, I can access the setting page only via privilege(private) SSID, but I spent so many time in accessing it. WEP2 encryption was troubled, always halted at authorization, and so do the DHCP either, always bugged at distributing local IP to the clients, must be fixed by MS fixing tools, ALWAYS. I've acknowledged these issues since the first release in TW, but still keep unfixed. I finally logged in, but I don't think novices would do so.

Finally, I had got in the setting page(192.168.10.1 as default rather then 192.168.0.1). I wonder ADSL is not public out of Taiwan, the English manual referred none of it... maybe foreigns use all static IP instead of ADSL? The default logon and pass is "admin/admin" -- essential to setting up PPPoE and changing SSID -- is not in English manual, too(but in Chinese manual). It is so hard to set up the device without Chinese Manual -- salute to Taiwan user who successfully set up the device of earlier release version which included no Chinese Manual!

These problems are not really lethal. Difficult progress of setting indeed but it can be finished in one day. The critical problem is the DNS it used. I can recognize it use DNS to authorize the access to Internet, if you are not authorized, any domain name you entered will redirect you to FON login page. But the DNS they use(now is 213.134.45.159 what hell it is?) is terrible, and hardly update their database. For example, if you use FON, you can't access Blogger New Page. I know this domain name is new, so try older domain name : beta.blogger.com ... Alas! 404 again. These DNS issue is not fixed since early November, and it is really critical.

FON still needs improving. Since the idea is so great, but it is still too unfriendly for novice and too bugged. Hope these issue will be fix in further days.