FON, the world’s largest Wi-Fi community, is calling on all residents of San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood to join the FON community and bring comprehensive WiFi access to the Castro. Any qualifying resident or business owner of the Castro is eligible to receive a free La Fonera wireless router, including installation.
FON is turning the Castro into a free Wi-Fi zone by having individual neighbors share a small portion of their Internet connection. Everyone who shares gets free access to all hotspots created by the community. Castro residents can request their free router at SharetheCastro.com.
“The people of San Francisco want the best WiFi access possible,” said San Francisco Supervisor Bevan Dufty. “I’m thrilled to support FON’s efforts to help solidify San Francisco’s reputation as the most wired city in the country.”
‘Share the Castro’ is a grassroots effort to bring WiFi to all through the contributions of individual business owners and residents. By everyone sharing a bit of their Internet connection, FON can turn those wireless access points into shared WiFi hotspots for the benefit of all.
In keeping with the ‘Share’ theme, famed Cher impersonator Chad Michaels was in the Castro recently giving away free routers to residents to make the neighborhood a ubiquitous WiFi zone. There is more information and videos at SharetheCastro.com.
“The residents of San Francisco - and the Castro in particular - are known for being a close-knit community at the forefront of technology innovation,” said Joanna Rees, U.S. CEO of FON. “With this in mind, it’s very exciting to kick off ‘Share the Castro’ today, and to have some fun while providing something of real value to Castro residents.”
FON’s unique La Fonera WiFi router comes with two wireless signals to ensure a user’s security - one private for personal, home use and one public for FON Community access. The public FON signal is only accessible to FON Community members and allows them to connect to the Internet while the private FON signal is not accessible to anyone except the home user. The La Fonera is easy to install and is compatible with Windows, Mac and Linux operating systems. It also allows you to connect all other WiFi-ready devices to your broadband Internet connection.
About FON
FON is the world’s largest WiFi community. FON’s mission is to stimulate the growth of WiFi around the world by creating a global community of “Foneros”. FON’s La Fonera routers have been designed to enable Foneros to share their home Internet access in a completely secure manner. Founded in February 2006 in Madrid, Spain, FON investors include Google, Skype, Index Ventures, Sequoia Capital and BT. Currently we have over 635,000 members in Europe, Asia and America and our community is growing fast. For more information, visit FON at www.fon.com.