Here’s an interesting idea…

FON is a Global Community of people who share WiFi. Share your WiFi broadband access at home/work and enjoy WiFi all over the world! FON: small cost, great benefit!

To become a Fonero, all you need to do is register with us on our website, have broadband connection, and download the FON Software onto your WiFi router. It’s that simple. Just share your connection and the rest of the Community shares back with you. Join FON and enjoy connecting from anywhere within the WiFi World.

According to the Press Release (which I found courtesy of New Google Blog),

Fon has secured €18 million (USD$21.7M) in Series A funding from Index Ventures, Google, Sequoia Capital and Skype. Index Ventures led the round. The company also announced that Danny Rimer (Index Ventures), Mike Volpi (Cisco) and Niklas Zennström (Skype) joined the board.

“There is perhaps no more important goal for the industry than helping to make broadband Internet access available around the world,” said Skype CEO Niklas Zennström. “FON has a great idea to help people share WiFi with one another to build a global unified broadband network, and we’re happy to lend support. Enabling more communities to tap into the power of the Web benefits us all”.

Three categories of user are envisaged. A Linus is any user who shares his/her WiFi in exchange for free access throughout the Community wherever there is coverage. At the moment, FON is only open to Linuses. In the future, however, FON will also be available for Bills. Instead of roaming for free, Bills are users who prefer to keep a percentage of the fees that FON charges to Aliens. And Aliens are those guys who pay to connect.

Hmmm… Wonder where they got those names from.

Thanks to Gerard and Imran for pointers to this.