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COPYRIGHT 2008 Japan Inc. Communications
Smaller devices incorporating wireless networking are proliferating--not just computers, but phones, PDAs and hand-held gaming machines are using the Internet to send and receive data at high speed. Areas of dense population, such as Japanese cities, would seem ideal for these networks which have limitations on the area covered by each base station, but on the other hand, setting up the infrastructure for such ubiquitous coverage would seem to be a prohibitively expensive operation.
It occurred to Martin Varsavsky, an Argentinean entrepreneur (and philanthropist) with experience in telecoms and networking, that one way of overcoming this problem was to allow the users themselves to set up and maintain the nodes of the network (already connected to the Internet through commercial ISPs) in return for being allowed to use the other users' nodes, and thus the idea of FON as a global shared community wireless network was born.
Starting in Europe, FON has now spread to Japan, through the intermediary of Junichi Fujimoto, the first president and representative director of livedoor, and a strong advocate of consumer empowerment via the Web. Although livedoor acquired a bad reputation in recent years through its stock-manipulation antics, the original livedoor, as set up by Fujimoto before his departure from the company, was a free Internet service designed to open the doors of the Web to ordinary Japanese people. At a time when online time was typically being rationed by Internet service providers (ISPs), this was a bold and liberating step. Fujimoto...
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