Great start to the day.  Am hooked up in a cafe at Zurich airport, while wife shops.  The conference attendees have been provided complimentary hotspot access via Swisscom, and courtesy of Whisher.  Feran Moreno personally sent that over, which I thought a nice touch.

The Whisher network is powered by users sharing their WiFi.

All WiFi networks registered through Whisher are protected and the owners (sharers) have full control on who and when can access them.

Whisher is an interesting concept that has been talked about for years, but this is the first big implementation I have seen.

Whisher launched at DEMO 2007.  Om writes about them here, and doesn’t think highly of their prospects.

…  the company positioned itself as a FON competitor that uses software instead of hardware to share bandwidth. I call it wishful thinking, given its limited utility and even more limited business prospects.

It seems to work this way.  You download their software, and it will sniff out participating Wifi networks.  presumably it will share yours when you are at home.  It is software based, and I smell high PC resource usage, but that remains to be seen. 

Personally, I can see this working.  Its one of those things that will have little impact until it grows, but the network effect could be experimental.  And as Om points out, they have been funded by Benchmark, so they will be around for some time anyway.

I say good luck to them.