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

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.