FON La Fonera Review
Recently, FON Hong Kong (thanks sidekick!) is kind enough to send me a FON La Fonera router for review.
The first thing I noticed is the form-factor. It’s light and compact, which is designed for people to carry around and create Wifi AP anywhere.
After I plugged in the WAN cable and turned it on, I set up my Netvigator PPPoE login and other configurations. The admin interface is pretty easy to navigate. I feel the boot time is slightly slower than Airport Express and other wifi routers I used. It needs a while to ‘recognize’ the connection. Not a serious problem, just don’t hang on me!
Setting up and registering the public hot spot is pretty easy as well.
The signal power is way better than the Airport Express. Back in the old days, Airport Express couldn’t get a decent signal from my living room to my study room (which is just one concrete wall away). La Fonera has no problem. Though I still couldn’t access the wifi from my bedroom, which is two concrete walls away from the router (I may need a stronger antenna?). Strong wifi signal is pretty important for apartments in HK, because most in-house walls are built by cements.
Overall I give a thumb up on the product, especially their vision on building free wifi everywhere. Enabling everyone with Internet access will help the economic and the opportunity on the web.
January 13th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Hello Leon,
Thank you so much of writing a review on La Fonera.
Guess that you need a better antenna to achieve the signal to your bedroom
or probably you could try to use a WiFi adapter to receive WiFi signal other than using plug-in one for higher stablity.
Anyway, thanks again!
And hope you enjoy what FON offers!
Regards,
FON Hong Kong
January 14th, 2008 at 8:45 pm
Leon, The boot time is longer because the La Fonera does a lot more things as compared to other wiFi routers.
A tip for you (maybe this should be on lifehack.org). You can use the FON friends and family option to provide a local user account on the La Fonera. This can be very useful in providing free wifi access to guests/visitors in an office environment. They will be connected to a separate VLAN and viruses/spyware on their PC’s won’t affect your office network
I also recommend the use of Devicescape as a quick way to auto-login to FON hotspots
Once again, welcome to the world of FON
June 3rd, 2008 at 4:45 pm
HELP!
Thai sounds great but will it work …
1. At home - have broadband but not currently wireless. Have router, wired.
2. On my boat. With an ASUS Eee mini laptop which is wifi enabled and runs a version of Linux …?