Whisher gives you the chance to be part of a community offering free WiFi services. Launched last month at Demo 2007, its main competitor is FON, and in fact, founder Ferran Moreno was part of FON until he left just before the official launch.

Where FON offers you the chance to share your WiFi with their own tweaked up router (Fonera), Whisher gives you the ability to use your current WiFi connection/ router by just installing their software application. With the Whisher software, you will have full control over your settings and it’ll even leave your current router settings alone. WiFi owners will have the ability to manage and see who is connected at any time with the ability to switch to a private mode (basically disabling the system) and to create a closed group of communities e.g. groups relating to friends and family. While on the same network, you chat locally or easily mark the files you want to share and initiate peer to peer transfers without any size limits.

I am personally not a big fan of sharing my WiFi network (that I pay monthly for) and I can’t see how it would market itself outside of residential areas. A large proportion of common public places have already been catered for by hotel and restaurant hotspots e.g. Starbucks, McDonalds etc. Yes some of them use T-mobile, AT&T or other networks and charge for them but I can’t see where Whisher can target it in cities or public establishments around these areas and whether those around them would even bother. My point is that most public places who would want to offer WiFi, would probably want to profit from it as well — therefore jumping on the established T-mobile and other big networks that may offer you a piece of the revenue. I can’t see many public places offering free WiFi (not yet anyway and not without a catch). It may be different in Europe or Asia and I can’t speak for them there although it would be interesting to see what the percentage of residential vs. public establishments have signed up for this.

I noticed one thing when I was browsing their site, security was not mentioned (or mentioned very obscurely). I do strongly suggest that they talk more about it as it does factor into how many will sign up for it. With security fraud and identity theft being a commonplace nowadays, it would comfort people to know that there is some sort of security mechanism in place (and how good it is).

The big question is … how reliable would the WiFi network be? I am a firm believer of “you get what you pay for”, and since you’ll be getting WiFi for free, the WiFi owner is in no obligation to give you support, nor a stable and secure network. With that, it would probably cut most of the business users out of the equation. Bandwidth or data quality may be an issue e.g. in a case where I would want to use VoIP while the owner or some other person using the network is currently downloading multiple files resulting in a poor connection.

As of date, there are 80 users within the USA, 10 in the United Kingdom and more worldwide. Although it does not take my fancy, it may still be useful for some. Other alternatives include Google Wifi, T-Mobile, AT&T and Boingo.

Product Page [Whisher]