Fon and Telstra partner up to bring crowdsourced Wi-Fi to Australia

Telstra customers will soon have access to one of the world’s largest Wi-Fi networks after the company launched a $100 million strategy to build 8000 Wi-Fi hotspots around the country. The strategy aims to offer all Australians access to two million Wi-Fi hotspots across the nation within five years. The network, which is scheduled to launch early 2015, will also reach overseas allowing people to connect at more than 12 million international hotspots, as part of an exclusive deal, recently concluded, with global Wi-Fi provider, Fon.

The “crowdsourced” Wi-Fi outfit Fon may currently be most interesting for the release of its Gramofon social music router, but at the core of it Spain’s Fon is all about the number of users it has making up its global Wi-Fi sharing network. That number is usually boosted by major deals with internet service providers, in which those ISPs’ customers choose to open up part of their broadband capacity to passers-by, and here’s a big one: Australia’s Telstra. On Tuesday Telstra, which is Australia’s largest ISP, announced a new national hotspot network, with Fon baked into it from the start. The plan is to create 2 million new Fon hotspots over the coming years by harnessing customers’ home routers, and through the creation of 8,000 new Telstra hotspots.