FON allows people to buy a wireless router from them for €30. They then share their WiFi with other Fon users and gain access to other Fon users’ connections.

Whilst many FON users are in residential areas, a few exist in public and commercial ones; there are dozens in Central London. This may rise as BT now integrates FON in their ‘Home Hub’ routers. Neuf Cegetel made a similar move.

They run a scheme which allows their users to profit. They can charge non-FON users a nominal fee to use their WiFi, so it could be extremely profitable in a central location!

La Fonera, the name of their router, transmits two SSIDs. One is encrypted, for your own private use, and one is open, for others to connect to.

If you’re interested, leave a comment to that effect and I can send you a promocode to get a €10 discount on the router.

Simple Port Forwarding is a portable software that tries to lessen the knowledge that is needed to configure port forwarding in a computer network. Port Forwarding on the other hand is only a issue of the computers connect to a router that establishes the connection to the Internet.

It basically tells the router where to send information that are being received on a specific port. The software currently supports 197 different routers and the software developer provides the means to suggest new routers if the current router is not available in the list.

Among the support routers are several popular brands like Zyxel, Belkin, Netgear or LinkSys. All the user needs to do is pick his router from the list of available ones and enter the username and password which are used to connect to the admin interface.

Simple Port Forwarding will automatically enter the default values which can be used if the values have not been changed.

The port forwarding software comes with a database of 677 programs that can be automatically added. This includes applications like Yahoo Messenger, Telnet and Teamspeak but mainly games like Age of Conan, Stalker or World of Warcraft.

If the application is not in the list it has to be added manually. All that needs to be done by the user is to pick a name, select a connection type and the start and end port.

The information can then be updated in the router by clicking on the Update Router button. The main advantage of Simple Port Forwarding is the interface and the database that contains lots of popular programs.