FON not giving me my own Internet

Unfortunately I will have to disconnect my FONera and buy a real WiFi router to replace it because that small box is a glitchy piece of crap compared to every other WiFi router out there.

The killer: if the LaFonera can not connect the FON authentication servers, then it thinks that there is no network available and does not let me use my Internet. There is even no way to force it to pass connections to outside which is required in many cases such as partial network failures (when you can not get to FON servers for some reason, but rest of the Internet works just fine) and for web signup pages that some ISP's use to login users to their network. And you can not use another PC for that, because it records the MAC address.

The box frequently freezes and the DNS server stops responding. I can continue working by editing my local DNS server settings to the DNS of my ISP, but that is no way to work!

The damn thing has no idea about uPNP which is a must nowadays for peer-to-peer transactions.

And lastly there is absolutely no way for me to fix any of this because the FON keeps a tight lock on the firmware. In the time when all good software and community projects go to the open side, the FON moves further and further to the dark side and that is disturbing.

I consider this a permanent failure on FON's part that negates my ability to hold my side of the Fonera promise.

It would be so much easier if I could ssh into the thing - ping stuff, traceroute stuff, put some kind of flag file to say that network in fact is there, release or refresh the DHCP lease or even restart the damn thing remotely. Nothing of this is available.