Community developed wifi network?

Yesterday, my colleague mentioned about this new startup called Fon during our lunch conversation. I was really impressed by their business idea. I looked up their website to find more details and here is how they describe themselves"FON is the largest WiFi community in the world. Our members share their wireless Internet access at home and, in return, enjoy free WiFi wherever they find another Fonero’s Access Point.".

Isn't that a great idea? It sounded more like those community developed software models, where people collaborate to build software together and distribute it freely to each other later. In this case they are trying to build a worldwide wifi infrastructure with very little investment with the help of the community and plan to share the infrastructure freely among members(Foneros). But the interesting aspect to this is, once this infrastructure is in place they can actually start making serious money too. I am pretty sure people would prefer this cheap access to internet than other alternatives currently available. But for people to actually pay for this service it needs to be reliable and I think that is going to be the biggest challenge for this business . I really wonder whether they would be able to provide a consistent(somewhat) highly reliable service at all the hot spots. I think the same disadvantages of open source software will also apply to this business.

Anyways, it is a great idea and it would be interesting to see how popular this business will be in the near future.

BTW, Just looked at the Fon map to see if they have a hotspot in my city and the search yielded a negative response. So wondering if I should be the first Fonero in my city? :)