Fon

1. A member of a people of Benin and neighboring parts of Nigeria.
2. The Gbe language of the Fon.

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Iron statue of the god of arms and war, made by the Fon of Benin, in the Musée de l'Homme, … (credit: Marc and Evelyne Bernheim — Woodfin Camp and Associates)

People of southern Benin and adjacent parts of Togo. They speak a dialect of Gbe, a Kwa language of the Niger-Congo language family. Numbering about 3 million, the Fon are mainly farmers. Craft specialists include male ironworkers, sculptors, and weavers and female potters. The primary Fon social unit is the polygynous family, each woman and her children occupying a house within a compound. The village under a hereditary chief is the traditional political unit. Dahomey kingdom was peopled principally by Fon.

For more information on Fon, visit Britannica.com.

(FON Wireless Ltd., Madrid, Spain, www.fon.com) A company founded in 2005 by Martin Varsavsky that sponsors a global Wi-Fi community. FON members, called "Foneros," install a special router that lets them securely share their Wi-Fi networks with other Foneros who are in the vicinity. In turn, they have free access to any other "FON Spot" (FON hotspot) in the world. FON's revenue comes from non-members who pay for access, and Foneros can share in that revenue when paying users log in through their hotspots. By the summer of 2008, there were approximately 800,000 Foneros worldwide with 340,000 active hotspots.

Hookup is Via La Fonera Router

Joining the FON community is accomplished by purchasing a low-cost router called "La Fonera," which hooks up to the user's network. The Fonera router provides two secure wireless signals, one for the owner and the other for the public. See Wi-Fi.

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