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Wi-Fi hotshot

Free Wi-Fi for every reader – if Martin Varsavsky has his way

Argentine-born entrepreneur Martin Varsavsky has created the world’s largest Wi-Fi network, and it’s free. But can “the perfect blend of socialism and capitalism” stand the test of time? By Barry Mansfield

The funky, lime-green offices of FON provide an air-conditioned respite from the fierce August sun of Alcobendas, on the northern outskirts of Madrid. Inside, a revolution is blazing with equal intensity. Martin Varsavsky, the company’s founder, is selling a utopia where consumers can share their home internet connection and, in return, surf the web for free via shared connections around the globe. Little wonder, then, that high-charging Wi-Fi hotspot providers such as T-Mobile and The Cloud are starting to feel the heat.

FON’s premise is that subscribers agree to share their existing internet connection via a router that the company provides. This means that someone in your street can be surfing the web via your router, which beams out its Wi-Fi hotspot over 100m. In return, those who sign up receive a user name and password allowing them to access other FON hotspots worldwide without having to pay a cent. Significantly, non-participants in the scheme can also access a FON hotspot at a cost of $3 (€2.20) per day, some $7 cheaper than the typical fee charged by established hotspot providers. A new router scheduled for release later this year promises a 400m range, meaning extortionate hotel internet charges could soon be a thing of the past as free Wi-Fi is beamed over from an office or café four streets away.

Varsavsky has earned a reputation for shaking up telecoms. The 47-year-old serial entrepreneur entered the sector in 1990, launching a call-back service called Viatel that he eventually sold for €1.2bn. He also founded Jazztel, the first alternative telecoms access provider on the Iberian Peninsula, which he sold for €1bn, and web portal Ya.com (including the second-largest Spanish-language online travel site), in which he invested €38m, later selling it for €550m to Deutsche Telekom’s T-Online International. Yet despite raking in around €300m from high-tech and telecoms ventures, and before that a biotechnology outfit, Medicorp Sciences, Varsavsky actually made his first million in New York City real estate at the forefront of the mid-1980s loft movement.

Born in Argentina, Varsavsky was 16 when his family of prominent Russian-Jewish intellectuals – his father was a Harvard-educated astrophysicist heading Argentina’s Radio Astronomical Institute – sought political asylum in the US following the murder of his cousin at the hands of Jorge Rafael Videla’s junta. He obtained degrees from NYU and Columbia and raised funds for his real estate venture while still at university.

Headquartered in Madrid since 1995, Varsavsky’s office at FON has the ultra-modern skyline of the Spanish capital’s high-tech quarter as its backdrop. Unsurprisingly it is kitted out with cutting-edge gadgetry, including the company’s signature router. His Apple laptop is plastered with logos of some of his recent investments, including the popular blog search tool Technorati. Varsavsky is a famously prolific blogger himself, with his views on the industry attracting over 200,000 fans monthly.

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