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I’m moving from home, so I had to change the home network configuration to let my father continue to connect… without my Netgear DG834G Wi-Fi router.

I connected my very nice Fonera to the old modem/router that my provider sent me a lot of time ago: it’s a Pirelli “AliceGate” device, with both USB and Ethernet ports… it can be used as a normal USB modem or like a router, but it hasn’t an integrated authentication system, so users must enter login and passwords from the PC to access the Internet.

So, I discovered che La Fonera can be configured to authenticate itself, and it’s really simple: just connect to it’s private network throught Wifi, and go with your favourite browser to it’s setup page (it’s default network address is http://192.168.10.1 and login/password are admin/admin), then go to “Advanced” section and enter these settings:

Internet Connection
- PPPoE
- User: your login (provided by your provider )
- Password: your password

Network settings
- IP: 192.168.1.254
- Subnet mask: 255.255.255.0
- DHCP ON

Now switch your Fonera Off and On… and after a couple of minutes you should be have a working Internet wi-fi connection available

Who doesn’t know what FON is? I already talked about this amazing project that tries to create a worldwide network of free Wi-fi spots, thanks to FON users sharing their bandwidth in a relationship of (free) mutual trade.

FON Maps is a Google Maps application that helps users to find the nearest FON access point, but what I can do if I’m going to move to a foreign city and I want to connect to a FON spot? I can’t use FON Maps if I’m not online, but I can’t go online if I don’t know where is the nearest FON access point!

Raúl Ochoa did something for me: FON Maps Liberator is a web mashup that uses FON Maps to export the position of access points in .GPX format, to add them to the “Point Of Interest” of our GPS. leggi tutto »

After less than 10 days after my order, today I received my FON Router
I spoke about the FON network some days ago on this blog, highlighting their interesting offer: 5 Euros (or 5 USD) for this nice Wi-fi router, and the possibility to get access to the worldwide FON network, to have free Wi-fi internet everywhere.

My Fonera is now running, you can see my active Hot Spot welcome screen on maps.fon.com, entering this address:
via Vittorio Veneto, Bordighera, Italy

Here there are some pictures of the box that I took with my cellular phone this morning… look at the “Hotspot sticker” ;)