Have You Had Problems Installing La Fonera?

i changed the address of my router 3 days ago… now my travel log shows all connections to my own router not to the original but to the actual address which in fact is not correct for a “travel log”… also i think all other users now are able to see were i moved to :(…

Pretty much all of the above (read the FON boards!). As with most houses in North America, my cable entry is in the basement, so the Fonera is really useless. Installing something like dd-wrt + FON on it would fix it.

I wanted to give a fonera to a friend in Israel,
but i was not able to install it.

The cable ISP (netvision, from HOT) connection is done with PPTP and VPN like login.

La Fonera support only PPPOE along with the universal DHCP, so i bring it back. in Europe.

He live in a busy and tourist place in Jerusalem, that would have make a lot of connections.

1. I am in Canada, the FON router charges in USD (a no no) (and apparently also charges European VAT!?)

2. The router does not get an address from my cable ISP.

3. would like to use it as a normal router too (more powerful firmware please - and open)

4. my address is shown on the FON pages (a big no no)

5. My ISP forbids sharing

and a few more issues.

Just read the forum… There are several people complaining about FON.
Or just go through the unanswered support tickets, I expect there are thousands of them.

I connected it but could not put it near a window because my router is too far from any windows.

The wifi bridge will be wonderful. it will allow us to put the fonera out side using the wifi of another AP.

Viva FON

Hi Martin,

Some problems with user-zone: the “travel log” shows wrong information regarding dl/ul, also the router-connections.

The personalized access-portal is a mess. The text I enter in my user-zone shows up in the access portal without any linebreaks. The link to my free-site is not working.

The Fon-Maps show wrong special-characters like German Umlauts.

Hi Martin,

My La Fonera would not give out IP adresses when i first connected it. I had to do a factory reset to get all the led:s to show status ok. After that, it worked but from time to time, i can only see one of the SSID:s, the wifi signal disappears completly (led goes dark) and quite often, the router refuses my password for the private network.

I would love to get in contact with you regarding this and some other things.

Martin,
see:
http://boards.fon.com/viewforum.php?f=2
You may want to answer the problems there directly, instead of on a blog.

I think it is interesting to know why you suddenly are personally interested in solving Foneros problems, and especially why you use a Blog entry for it. You may want to elaborate on that.

Please confirm you read all problems on your forum, in which case we don’t need to copy them all to your blog !

Hi

I have a problem to connect to La Fonera (My local internet). I have 2 laptops, 1 is working ok but the other 1 doesn’t, the issue I have is when I search for wireless networks I can see my local fon access and the public, when I select the local I get asked for the WPA key that I type after the it starts searching the different channels and never connects to it.
I have a Trendnet TEW-421PC in a Win2k.

Below are screenshots of what I see

Result found of wireless networks.
http://img530.imageshack.us/my.php?image=fonwirelesssc3.jpg

After I put in the WPA serial it shows the page tab below, the channel keeps going over all of them over and over again.
http://img530.imageshack.us/my.php?image=fonscanningtk9.jpg

Other setup I have
ttp://img530.imageshack.us/my.php?image=fonadvanceqo4.jpg

Any ideas what can cause the problem? With the same PC I can connect to my Belkin router also setup with WPA.

Thanks in Advance

1) “ä”, “ö”, “ü”, “ß” are not written correctly on the FON maps

2) I can´t unpersonalize my LaFonera (delete - not just overwrite with different values - the values I entered originally)

3) Why are hotspots shown in green? - orange ist the color of FON!

I have an Alcatel speedtouch ADSL router, with the fonera plugged directly into it. It hands out DHCP leases on the 192.168.0.0/24 range and also acts as a DNS proxy, and hands out primary DNS as 192.168.0.1 (itself).

Initially, the fonera picked up an IP address (192.168.0.22) so I connected to the FON_AP SSID, but couldn’t browse to wifi.fon.com. After a few minutes, the “internet” LED on the fonera went out, along with the ethernet link light for that port on the ADSL router and now I can’t pick up the FON_AP or Myplace SSIDs at all.

I tried to connect my PC to the fonera by a patch cable, setting the PC’s IP to 169.254.255.2 but that didn’t help (still didn’t have a hardware link - I’ve tried two new patch cables and a crossover). I also tried to reset it by unplugging the fonera, holding down the reset button, plugging power back in whilst holding the button for 30s. Still no ethernet link/internet light on the fonera.

I logged this as a support request a week ago, but haven’t heard anything back from FON… I’m assuming that the fonera is dead-on-arrival but I don’t seem to be able to get them to send out another one.

Help

Another marketing trick ?

Forums are plenty of problems without answer…

As this one…

http://foros.fon.com/search.php?search_id=egosearch

A few quick answers to some from a FON staffer typing away on his PDA :

Harald and martin –> our techies are fixing these travel log bugs as we speak. It should be working smoothly soon.

hellofon –> we’re working in it. some issues with accents in french too.

Goubs –> yes, a WDS bridge would rock. Yet another cool project to work on

Jos,

CEO´s can´t be everywhere at the same time. My main occupation in the last 2 months was to find ways to get enough foneros to have fonero densities over 1/10,000 inhabitants in all major countries. That has been accomplished so now I shift focus to making sure the foneras work, in most cases they do but in too many they don´t and I am learning why both from the boards and my blog. In any case we are working on the Fontennas that will greatly increase coverage and we will deliver those in April.

Hello,
my friend send me a FoneraGetFonera Invitation.
I got my Fonera and it is running. Somehow I screwd up and my friend can not send new FGF nvitations because my Status is still Accepted and not completed.
I dont know what I did wrong, can you help me, so that my friend can send a new FGF invitation?

Thank you
Sabine

Martin,
(for the rest of the audience: I am Jos…),
Your board exists for about a year now, it had the “help with installation” forum staffed by volunteers for a very long time.
I suppose the time has come to notice what is going on there, and in other postings on the board, and not here in blog-comments.
In the meantime, I made a post to that forum asking people to write their problems on this blog, some may feel invited.

Hello.
I have a small problem and I dont know how to solve the problem.
I have registred my fonera, but NEED to change my Emailadress.
How can I do this??

Thanks
Phil

Thank you Jos!

Hellofon,

We will check into the letters used in German that are not seen by our systems and get back to you.

Hiya

I’ve got my fon, and its ace
Couple of things:

1) When my address is entered correctly, your site cannot find me on google maps so i have to manually pin myself.

2) Your ‘beta’ map of worldwide foneros is crap and you can’t even search for anything, plus its too heavy (and thats even for firefox!)

3) Fon router should have an option to hide the SSID of the private network, so only the public SSID is broadcasted (users can write down the private SSID and still connect to it if required)

4) I Also have a linksys router, but why dont you form friends with hardware vendors!!? provide them with an API or source-code which they can add into their products, more coverage for you and as a feature that they support fon.com!

5) Suprised you haven’t got this lil beauty of a fonero router selling in major retailers in the uk, brits love to make money or like to connect to free broadband if its being shared!

6) FON router portal sucks, allow users to point it to there own website/blog, having google this and google that and then the odd flickr is a bit tacky!

7) Thats it!

Tom Taylor

Hiya

Another thing too which is a MUST for your fon routers next firmware release:

WDS bridge

Many isp’s here in the uk give out speedtouch adsl routers, and they support WDS!

If the fon router did too, every1 with a WDS router can double the coverage of their fonero, fantastic!

Hope this can be implemented soon, otherwise i have no use for a perfectly good router
Thanks!

Tom

We will find out what is going on Sabine

I have both the older Linksys FON router and the Fonera, which I got from your blog for spanish readers. Intended to give linksys to in-law, but in have not been able to get it to work - so using linksys instead. Good for you cause FON access point is alive here, bad because one less AP and wasted $$ on this Fonera.

What’s wrong with it? Lost connection on a cycle, or no connection until I cold boot - something I’ve seen reported on the forum consistently.

Great initiative Martin, and I understand support is on the low side given the kind of biz you are trying to start… but sure you are missing on a wider network b/c of people like me, who got tired of trying to get the Fonero to work after a couple of hours, at what appears to be a Fonera problem (and not my network or config).

Shalom,
I ordered a la Fonera on February 7, 2007 and have yet to receive it. I don’t know how long shipping takes to San Francisco, but it would be nice to be able to track it from the shop. Many thanks!

Received the Fon without any problems. Now have to replace the current Wi-Fi router with the Fon. Guess what? I’ve run out of electric outlets. Need to solve that before it goes online. I promise it’ll be soon!!!

1) La Fonera seems to only request an ip at boot and then goes into some “something is wrong…4 scenario’s mode”… untill someone manually repowers the device… At most isp’s (eg ADSL) it’s very common that every 36hours the dhcp lease halts and within 5 minutes a new one is given… I can hardly tell my friends to put a timer on the power outlet of La Fonera
2) Most people are getting a Wifi router these days of their ISP (even with voip on it)… it would be nice if the Fonera could be used as a “repeater” and thus placed at a very good place to reach many people (eg The Window)…
3) It would be nice if the device supported Power Over Ethernet and the “slick” white cable would have an injector at the other side so to minimize cables and thus the owner would be convinced to put the “Imac/Ipod”-slick device on a “can be seen” location… (if it could perform a repeater function without having the lan cable inserted…even better!)
4) The fonera needs attention on it’s local admin side… hence changing it’s NAME or PASSWORD via http://www.fon.com doesn’t work in 99,99% of the cases… so I have to go fysically there & fix it…
5) most of my friends have internet and want to share it… but aren’t technically experienced or eager to check everyday if it’s still running… It would be nice to have some “watchdog” function going to their “mentors” (the one who invited them to the FON network?)… Currently we keep our eyes on the FON maps…
6) Most people have a (adsl/cable) router with only 1 LAN entry… and Fonera would only benefit people who have a wireless laptop…others will have to by a hub/switch/router/usb wifi device if they want to surf themselves… a “lan” on La Fonera would indeed be perfect for this…also it would give FON more control on the QOS between MyPlace & FON_x 7) La Fonera can’t be put behind 2 routers… (eg cable router -> Fonero Linksys -> La Fonera) … I guess the “mtu” would be too much for La Fonera? La Fonera comes out of the box with only “MyPlace” working but some people don’t have an XP & SP2 installed to connect via WPA… and change these default settings (only then I notice that the FON_x is working as well)…
9) most people seem to lose connection due to the “battery saving” features of every Intel laptop/wifi card and the SSID which changes in the FOnera… -> lost connectivity -> fon broken? -> Fon in the dumpster…
10) no support guy on the phone?
I only found “fon install parties” in France… dunno if there is an incentive to create such things in other places as well…

Richard,

Interestingly, at FON we believe that one of the problems that the foneras have is that they don´t have two Ethernet ports, but we certainly did not think that the problem is that they did not have an electrical outlet

We will look for it Prolific Programmer!

#12 Alex, could you tell us the email that you used to create the support ticket, please? We will check it and probably we will have to pick up your Fonera to test it in our laboratories and exchange it if proceed.

#17 Phil, you have to register a new user with the new email, and then ask us to unregister the mac adress of your Fonera from the old user and assign it to the new one.

#20 Tom, thanks for your feedback. About the street being shown on the maps, the point has to appears on the maps so other Foneros can locate where there’s a Fon hotspot. What you can do is to put a less specific adress on your router’s location.

#21 Juan Miguel, could you tell us the model of your DSL router, wireless network card on your computer, and operating system, please? Any help you need with configuration or other FON issues, you have access to the customer support website with it’s knowledge base, the Customer Care team, and all the helping Foneros in the forums.

#2 Alan, we are going to send your suggestions to our development team, we think the best solution by now is to change your antenna for another one with better coverage and vertical polarization.

#3 DavidB, with la fonera you can configure PPTP connections based, by now you can’t use VPN through la fonera, but we are going to forward your suggestions to our development team, like we do with other fonero’s suggestions.

#4 Bill, our online shop is not accepting different currencies, I know fonero’s like you understand that we opened some days ago, please give us a chance to improve our online shop. Please try the following, turn off your cable modem and la fonera for a couple of hours, probably your ISP is requiring MAC address authentification and la fonera is an Access Point, nor an ADSL router or a modem cable.

#8 David, please tell us what kind of broadband do you have, your laptop model as well as the operating system and browser version and also tell us if you have an ADSL router or cable modem, that information is going to be very usefull for us in order to give you the proper response.

#10 Raul, could you please verify that your WIFI wíreles device is working? If it’s working, probably the problem could be that your operating system needs an upgrade. If your wireless adapter is not working, please use another one from another PC and maybe your wireless device needs an upgrade too.

What I really didn’t like is that I sent an email to your support regarding a problem and I didn’t receive any answer.
I think this is poor “2.0″ attitude.

I have yet to receive tracking information for my order, placed Feb 7.

My experience is that la Fonera works only in Open mode. Any other mode (WAP, WEP) disconnects after a few seconds of use (just enough time to display one page of setup and change it back to Open).

The Lafonera has somehow big problems with WMM in terms of the encrypted wlan signal.
I tried it with the Nokia E61 (newest Firmware) and with a Centrino notebook with a 3945ABG device (newest xp drivers). When the Mobile device is using the energy saving mode (wmm) the connection is disconnected every couple seconds! it is not getting disconnected phisically, but the data asked from the server were just not transported.
When i turn off the energy saving mode in the Nokia E61, the WLAN works fine with the encrypted signal. Same phenomenon with the inel wlan card. Is the notebook connected to the power adapter, everything works fine. But when its on battery mode, it sucks surfing through the fonera.
I also tried it with 2 lafoneras, and it was everytime the same!

The “Personalize your FON Access Portal” function is broken since some weeks. Adding on the web form a new website, the script from the website adds automatically an http://.
If you now visit your Access Portal and try to click on the webadress you added, two “http://”s are added to the link.
For example i add http://www.mozilla.org on the webform.
The script makes http://www.mozilla.org out of it. When you click on the http://mozilla.org link in the access portal, you are directed to http://http://mozilla.org, and this cant work ;)!

#40: Yours is a very unique experience and we have to understand why that is the case. Indeed most problems we have found is with Macs not being able to detect the Fon network but not the encrypted network and that is an Apple problem that they fixed.

i think that #40 has the same problem
i tried to explain with the wmm mode in #41.

It is defenitly a problem in the fon firmware! i have heard from more than 5 people having the same problem not recieving data from the fonera beiing connected to the wpa encrypted signal.
Aspecially with centrino notebooks, or in my case with the E61 from nokia the problem appears, and it doesnt matter which form of encryption you use on the fonera (wpa/wpa2, mixed // tkip/aes or mixed in all combinations).
It seems that some WLAN clients are really sensible about it, although it works with other wlan hardware perfectly, like with the netgear wg311.

Seb,

We are working on this and we will have a reply by next Tuesday.

1) I’ve tried registering for the user forum in the FON user zone but it says that someone must manually approve my forum access. It’s been several days and still no forum access approval. Why does this need to be a manual approval?

2) I got my Fonera connected to my network and registered, however, checking with NetStumbler, I’m only seeing either on SSID or the ot