Fon (Disclosure: I am on their board of advisors, a compensated position) and Skype are making available a combination of a Fon router (La Fonera—a nicely designed piece of hardware that automatically creates two networks, one public and one for your private use) and a wifi phone that lets you make Skype calls wherever you can find an open wifi signal. It’s $159 (£99, €139), and it comes with a bunch of SkypeOut minutes for calling regular phones (as opposed to calling computers running Skype). Judging from the Skype accessories page, it looks like this combo is a big price break: A skype wifi phone by itself costs $219 (after a $30 rebate).

You don’t need the Fon router for the Skype phone to work, and it doesn’t work only with Fon signals. It looks like the bundle is intended to encourage those of us who rely on open wifi signals to provide free wifi signals at home, which is more or less Fon’s raison d’être. [Tags: skype fon wifi]

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