1. There are no telco partners. We directly sell to consumers.
2. Data sharing & usage is metered. You accumulate then you use it elsewhere. Its called Karma GB.
3. We are also thinking of putting up a feature that lets you enable 'free wifi' if you are a cafe/restaurant owner and you need a DIY solution for your customers. Thinking of keeping it as paid feature.
I can use any Fon router despite not being a client of a partner ISP.
We are also going to put a feature which would let people manage their free WiFi hotspot with Griggi as well.
The vision is to be the default WiFi sharing platform across the world. As a user, you just have your Griggi username, password & you use it to connect to every other WiFi hotspot.
I live in a small residential street where every neighbour who wants Internet has cable or fiber, so the chances of gaining significant Karma are very low. Let's also suppose I'm not a geek.
So, why would I pay $20 (+shipping?) for a new router, ask a friend to come by my house to install it, pay the electricity costs, etc, when in the end I'll still have to pay more to actually use it?
The Karma system eliminates the incentive for almost anyone except those living in busy streets to purchase and run their own router.
And this is helped by the fact that metered connections have all but disappeared around here, so a person with high Karma isn't actually "paying" anything for it, it's merely a rent that she can extract from the location of her property.
So I predict you'll mostly get users in city centers, which is where they are the less useful, since it's also where you can usually already get free or cheap Wifi.
What we are trying to do is similar to what Uber did to cars. Not everybody need to own a car. Similarly, not every household need a dedicated wifi connection when you can borrow some from neighbours.
Apart from city center, big apartments are another good case for Griggi. Big apartments in cities have a good number of migratory population.
Free WiFi hotspots that works is still a rarity in city centers of developing nations. Griggi is also an attempt to organize the unorganized free WiFi hotspots. A couple of guys are trying to solve this problem by building a mobile app that does the job of remembering username password of free wifi hotspots. Griggi is an attempt to solve the problem at the root. But I agree that it also makes things more challenging for us.