Time for the long-awaited review. It surprised me, to say the least.
I got it back from my friend today and as soon as I got back to my house, I plugged it in. Immediately, I received a signal from it. That's only to be expected from wireless routers.
I put in the CD and up popped a flash document. Yuck. I'm a bit bias because I don't like Flash very much. Sue me.
Rather sparse. Actually, the only things on the disc are .pdfs, which you'll need to figure out what bills** and shit are.
Really, you don't need to do anything other than plug it in and you're ready to go, so just go ahead and start playing with it.
To connect to your "myplace" connection, your password is the serial on the bottom of the router:
S/N: 8650015453
That's mine.
SIGNAL TEST*:
Me sitting on top of both of my routers:
The highlighted router is my normal Linksys router. Myplace is the private portal and Fon_AP is the public one.
At the front door:
As you can see, the Linksys is the winner when it comes to being close distances.
But, about 150 feet away and across the street:
Wow, the Linksys is a sad old man here. At this point I can get neighbors' connections. As you can see, the La Fonera with its tiny antenna and costing zero dollars can beat out the fifty buck Linksys monster. Impressive.
The La Fonera gets two thumbs up for me as a router, but the whole Fonbucks thing and Bills and such can get confusing. That's not to say that the Fon.com people can't help. The User Manual on the disc is a massive amount of help when it comes to understanding everything, but as I said before, all you really care about is the router.
out of five.
*
All wireless signals were received using a PSP, so it's probably not the best benchmark for, say, a Wii's internal antenna or laptop Wifi card.
**
Bills are what you get when people connect to your wifi, i.e. they are their
bills. They pay, somehow, and Fon.com deposits money into a Paypal account of your choosing. I haven't set it up to where you have to pay to connect to the open one, but you have to set up everything through wifi.fon.com when the router is installed. I have no intention of making people pay for the wifi, so I don't need to do any of that. Thusly, I won't go into too much detail about it since it can be seen on the user manual.