Why do some Foneros disconnect their Fonera WiFi router?

I guess it are two reasons actully.

it is: “they need the internet cable that goes into the fonera”
and: “they have legal or security concerns”

For me, I had the early ones, one buffalo and one linksys, and now I have two new foneras. They are both on but the old ones are off, well, one is still running.

The one that is still running is actually only used because I want to connect my desktop through cable and not WLan and have a network attached storage at home too, which again needs a cable.

bandwidth throttle ? witht he default FON firwmare?

I don’t live in Spain. I live in Belgium. Here all ISPs have a cap on your download volume. So if I have 20 Gb allocated per month, I see no use in opening my Wifi connection to strangers.

People owning a Nokia N8×0 disconnect/hack it because the Fonera is not properly working with their devices. As a part of this community I would vote for roaming (didn´t disconnect though…)

Security concerns, no way that a device I don’t have full control over but others have is connected to my LAN!

I don’t think it falls into any of these categories

I think often something unrelated happens , like the cables need moving, or a power socket is full. The Fonero has to do something. If he doesn’t see a reason to spend a little effort to keep the Fonera going, then he won’t. It will get disconnected for a couple of minutes, but never be connected again.

The benefits of having a Fonera connected are not yet strong enough in reality. Almost certainly, and for sure for me, I so rarely run into a Fonera that I can use when travelling, that I only keep my own Fonera going to be true to the cause. I don’t get much benefit from it.

But I am lucky, I have hundreds of square metres, masses of power and tons of cables. If I had a cramped little apartment in the town, the psychological cost/benefit analysis might not come out so well.

My 2 boxes are still online. 1 old linksys, and 1 Fonera (that I also use for my private WiFi use in-home). But no-one else seems to be using the signal The location where I live is also far from perfect for broadcasting WiFi to the public, living in an appartement that is part of a ‘walled-garden’ having only windows facing the garden, not the ‘public-street’. When travelling in Europe, I didn’t have a lot of access to the Fon signal when I wanted to have a signal. In most hotels I only can get the hotel-network, often for a disturbingly high price, and at company offices there is normally no Fon available, altough I got a Fon signal at the Alcatel-Lucent premises in Paris.

Top reasons for disconnecting might be:

1. Now I have WiFi but lost my ethernet connection:
If the user does not have a gateway, but only a 1-port ADSL/Cable modem, the fonera is nice for WiFi, but you’ll lose the ethernet-cable connection. Fonera+ solves this problem, but the implication of buying a Fonera-classic and losing your ethernet-cable connection when you do not have a switch/router is not clear.

2. I already have WiFi and don’t use Fon when away-from-home:
I the user already has WiFi, or switches provider and gets a new box including WiFi, why *also* connect the Fonera?
Why Fonera?
a. When WiFi APs/router were more expensive, the Fonera was a nice cheap way of getting WiFi in your home
b. Free Fon WiFi signal everywhere!
But:
a) Now a WiFi box for your home network is included in most/all Dutch ISP offerings. So I don’t need Fonera for that anymore.
b) There is no ‘Fon signal everywhere’. It’s a promise for the future, but not available now (depending on your region)

3. No-one is using my Fonera, so why keep it online?

So how to motivate people to keep their Fonera online?
Make sure you sell the right product (Fonera/Fonera+).
Give Foneros some, chance, on instant results, goodies lotteries: a WiFi picture frame each month, free skype-out minutes, every half year a 23andMe kit.

Hi Martin , I didn’t vote the poll simply because I didn’t find the answer that fit my case.
I disconnected ( better to say reflashed with dd-wrt my own , not fon given , linksys wrt54g ) at home because in my neighbourhood I preferred to follow the Bruce Schneier’s point of view.
I have in other locations many active foneras , but I thought to give to my beloved neighbours the wifi absolutely for free.

Cheers

Anton

A.Faith, the fonera has basic QoS and you can choose the amount of bandwidth, you can improve that further with addons like freewlan, it’s not perfect but is good enough.

In my humble opinion most of the people that buy La Fonera just want it because is the cheapest router available, the wireless chip is very good and there are alternative and better firmware for the device.

In my case I share because I like to share, never used another FON_Spot and never gained money, until now people just used the 15 minutes ad video, I live in a small village and almost all my neighbours have ADSL connections.

Best regards to all

Neither of the two reasons I would have picked are listed in the poll options. These would be:

1) FON has had a longstanding bug that causes FONspots to show as offline when they are, in fact, online. The FONspot must be rebooted for FON to mark the FONspot online and sharing again. (In my case, my FONspot gets flagged as offline usually every two to three weeks, and must be rebooted.) The FONspot does not show any visible error condition (no amber LEDs), so unless someone logs into their FON account at http://www.fon.com, they will never know their FONspot is disconnected. There are multiple threads reporting this same phenomenon on the FON forums, albeit worded differently.

2) They are unhappy with decisions made by FON to give away their bandwidth for free. The most recent example of this is giving free access to GMail. Most people using a WiFi hotspot are doing so solely for the purposes of checking their E-mail. Giving away free access to GMail means these people no longer have any incentive to sign up. A FONspot operator has no means to opt out of these (poor) decisions made by FON, so they vote with their feet and disconnect the FONspot. (Possibly replacing it with one of the other WiFi provider kits for small busineses, such as offered by Boingo.)

Actually, none of those reasons is correct. What most foneros do need is the ability to bridge the home network with the fonera created network, the fact that we can’t makes port forwarding, among other things, a nightmare. The need to expand a network is very different from the need to create a network. Also, the fonera firmware is awful and extremely limited. I think the overall idea is that the members should have a lot more control over their foneras, which is a very capable device which is being limited at the source. The only control FON should have over a device which I pay for is the “phone home” feature along with the FON_AP side of things, all the other features should be over my control, not Fon’s..

I think quite a few of them lose interest in the whole FON concept after a while…

Martin, none of these questions comes close to the reasons why people quit using your Fonero. Also, how are those people who have quit Fon going to see this survey? All of your responses are from people who have not actually done what you ask about, yes?

To many people, Fon sounds like a good idea for adding wifi to their existing home network. La Fonera is an all-wifi replacement, not an addition. So they have wifi Internet, but they cannot share drives or print. This is the main thing. It can be added to the firmware of the original router very simply, but you sell another router now that has a LAN jack, hmm?

Then, the router does not have MAC cloning, like every other router, ever. I cannot connect my Fonera to my modem for this reason. Luckily, I have my Linksys router to take care of that, and plug Fonera into a LAN jack there.

Finally, how am I to sell your brand of wifi, if it is free everywhere? I need to set my own price, or Fon needs to add something to make it sweeter. I am reading that VPN can be added to protect the unencrypted signal, and that this will make Fon really safe.

Because No one had connected to my router fon for almost a year so I decided to turn it off to prevent power wasting …

In my opinion many Foneros disconnect their FON router’s because they are limited by FON firmware and missing of the other LAN port!

I liked the concept, and 5 months ago bought LaFonera+ end even LaFontenna, (though I didn’t intent making any money as Bill and certainly didn’t need LaFontenna for my small apartment). After my share of installation problems, which I probably couldn’t have solved if I were not a technical person - now the router sends both signals and only needs a re-start once a week or so.

But now I have my doubts about usefulness of the concept (for people like me, at least).

1. Even though I put LaFontenna in an optimal way against the window, the signal strength on the roadside is minimal. Had it been a typical router without external antenna, placed inside the apartment - no connection would probably be possible from outside. Which means, presumably a large part of FON spots are in reality not available, even if online.

2. Nobody has as yet used my FON spot. And I remember the guy, recently mentioned in this blog, who put his LaFontenna outside in the best possible way to provide the whole street - he also gets no guest traffic.

3. During the 5 months, only on few - if any - occasions I could really needed FON roaming - but no FON spots were available there within 10km anyway.

4. But imagine, I’m somewhere in a car with my laptop, and may need internet. To find a FON spot and get connected, I need an internet connection, though. I don’t have any navigation software to import the FON spot list into it. Google Earth doesn’t seem to work offline. Printing out a FON map before the jorney is a hassle.

What could be done about the last point: If it were possible to save a map of a reasonably large area (say, 10 by 10 km) as vector graphics with sufficient resolution, it would make finding a FON spot at one’s travel destination easier.

I still keep the router always on, and would probably stay with FON.

Maybe the main convern is about traffic volume caps. If your contract doesn’t entitle you ilimited traffic than you may be concerned about having ti pay excess traffic.

At least that was one of my concerns while my contract had a trafffic cap, the other one boing legal concerns. Reading through the small print isn’t an easy task, but I had to do it and it was not easy indeed.

I disconnected my fonera because:
- I do want to make money and never find a fon-spot, when I need it or the signal reach of spots is not good.
- I never saw anyone connect to it, I guess of the same reason then me never finding a functional spot.
- The fonera can not replace my existing WLAN-Router/ Fritzbox, so it doubles functionality, consumes or better wastes energy, which is from and ecological and financial standpoint not a good idea.
- If you provide a software which can be installed on the fritzbox (very, very common in Germany and elsewhere), I will be happy to provide a fon-signal
- Also it would be great if there where a co2-emission-compensation programme, which compensates for all the extra energy which is consumed by foneras (in total, this should be very much and increasing since the amount of foneras is increasing).
- the German fon blog had a very unpolite stile for quite a while, dissing a lot of members of the community. The stile has changed, but I have never seen a public apology.

I think that the main reason for myself is that the fonera gives me nothing, that I already have.

As my answer is quite long a post something there

My personal experience is that: nobody use (only me and my family with MyPlace SSID) the hotspot so, keep online La fonera for 24h when we use only 3h-6h, it’s a waste of electricity. When somebody start to use the hotspot i turned on it for 24 hours a day (i could earn something..).

If I may ask a question, so far unanswered precise, the use of freewlan addons is compliant with Fon regulation? It would have some interesting features for me.

Mark, I agree the best option is to be able to download a firmware upgrade into the WiFi Router you already have but, as you know, there are too many routers out there and some of them not even have a small piece of memory free to add any new features, the hardware/electronic constrains are big in many cases. On the other hand we have already done some with our partners Neuf and Brithsh Telecom so their boxes, with big memory, can be reflashed with a FON-Friendly software and you do not need a second box. We are also in discussions with German ISPs so we can cooperate and add the FON-Friendly feature to the AVM Fritzbox. The Fritzbox is actually a great machine done by one of the most reputable CPE manufacturers in the world: AVM.
I also want to apologize if any of the comments in the German blog has offended you at any time, we are as close as we can to the Foneros and, believe me, we try to be very polite with all people that comment in our blog so we keep learning from all of you, we will try harder! Thanks!
Jordi - FON

Crissty, the Fonera+ is actually designed for Foneros that need a LAN port besides the WAN connection. Fonera 1.0 is just for Foneros that have at least one PC with WiFi, a WiFi USB dongle or a PCMCIA/CardBus WiFi card.
Jordi - FON

I cannot speak for those who have left FON altogether nor those that frequently switch their fonera on/off (at the obvious disdain of FON) and, like Kevin aptly noted above, this blog/poll isn’t going to reach that target audience anyway. Martin, I would suggest you E-mail the foneros and ask them directly.

The poll has too few reasons listed but I voted for my most likely choice out of the bunch. From my own experience, as a fonero for over two years, here are my opinions:

1) The initial enthusiasm for the movement, gaining a quality piece of hardware (Linksys WRT-54GL) _and_ the vision of an organized, distributed sharing of WiFi, has since waned. I kept the original Linksys up for just over a year and considered leaving FON, having in that year not been able to find any other operating Fon Spot despite so very many markers on the WiFi map. At the behest of AustinTX on the forum and in support of the original FON vision, I rejoined for yet another year by buying in with a Fonera. Originally very enthusiastic about this (a Linus at heart), I have flip-flopped about whether to continue support to this day. My one year’s time is nearly up for me yet again…

2) I have (as good as never) rarely had anyone even use my Fon Spot. I log in to My Fon every once in a long while to check on things, login history, etc. Last November, IIRC, I logged in and see that the control panel says that my Fonera was not online. Surprised because it most certainly was, I power cycled it and brought it back up. Being concerned about WiFi security (encrypted or not), I rarely use my own WiFi in favor of a wired connection, so I never noticed that the Fonera was “offline” despite being powered up and no visual indication otherwise. Then I see that I now have a 27 cent balance owed me (now as a Bill).

It seems that back in July/August someone _finally_ used my Fon Spot, “purchasing” on four occasions “15 minutes promotion pass”. Now, to my horror and not making FON/Fonera/firmware look very good, the Fonera had at some point “stopped working” _just_as_it_was_FINALLY_beginning_to_be_used_by_the_target_audience! To see FON _finally_ come through and attract _some_ sort of business, only to fail and lock-up, doesn’t speak well to the quality and reliability of FON and makes me as a fonero that much less enthusiastic about FON. Now, so very many months later, those four fleeting 15 minute connections have gone elsewhere, never to return (to my Fon Spot in any case). What could have been a (nearly) paying customer is now gone, having been failed by this Fon Spot when it unknowingly stopped working. Why did I not receive a notification from FON, an E-mail, something? I had no way of knowing it was down because my home network is all cabled, rarely using the WiFi connection myself so I didn’t know anything was amiss.

3) Having done a fair amount of travel with my laptop and Netstumbling in search of FON, I have never found one to be up/online when I needed it. This goes to the original vision, share and be able to connect to those who share. I liked when the WiFi map showed whether or not a Fon Spot had been active recently but it seems that functionality has disappeared. It’s nice to see so many dots on the map but it hasn’t served me well when I tried to actually find one that worked. However, having been over a year now since I have even tried actually speaks volumes for how much faith I now hold in FON to come through.

4) My early concerns of possible bandwidth hogs or illegal activity have long since waned. It’s almost like “security by obscurity”. Nobody connects anyway. In fact, maybe “those types” go elsewhere, looking for an actual open connection. I do still think that this reason is partly why others may disconnect the Fonera. By turning it off, especially when they’re not using it themselves, they gain some sort of (if not the only) control over their Fonera’s use.

5) Support: I have only had one support issue and it remains outstanding and unaddressed now three weeks afterward. This was an issue that could not be resolved by searching the forum for asked/answered issues of similar nature. In all my time here, there always seemed to be quite a few who needed help but had to resort to the forum because the normal route of getting in line on FON’s support system got them no (timely) response. Well, to be fair, I did receive the E-mail message acknowledging my issue. Despite the stated “Customer Care Service will aim to respond to you within the next business day”, three weeks plus and counting is just another straw on the camel’s back. Since “Your ticket number will be reviewed in the order in which it was received”, there must be a LOT of unsatisfied people such as myself waiting…

Whoa, I guess I had a little bit of venting to do. My aim is to be constructive and I hope FON’s shortcomings can be ironed out. The original hope that ISP’s in general would support FON and we would all gain widespread coverage hasn’t come to fruition. I read about advances in coverage and alliances that are always promising. I was hoping to take advantage of this in Tokyo, Japan soon but my trip has been cancelled. If such an alliance was to happen here in Southern California, I would be ecstatic. I am still pro-FON and would love to see others continue to support it, but it just doesn’t have the luster it did at first.

Caw, thanks for your comment. We have improved the issue of having Foneras loosing its heartbeat but, you are right, we still need to make our heartbeat new system more robust to any type of network situations. Regarding letting visitors check Gmail for free, I don’t agree with you, most Foneros have welcomed the initiative of having Gmail service available for all, the main reason why we become Foneros is to share and this is a service that many non-Fonero visitors appreciate and, after they use it, they are more willing to become part of the community. Giving small incentives for no-Foneros visitors to become community members is in benefit of all of us Foneros because help get more members into the community and share.
Jordi - FON

Bait-Fish, thanks for your constructive criticism, indeed making sure no Fonero needs to restart their Fonera is of most importance for all of us, it has improved in the last two months but still we need our system to be 100% effective on this. Let me give you some positive news in case you finally manage to get to Tokyo! If you go there you will be amazed by the huge coverage that Foneros from all over he world can get right now in Tokyo city area. We have partnered up with Livedoor, the largest WiFi city network in Tokyo, and now all Foneros can log into any Livedoor access point for free. Check the Tokyo FON maps and you will be amazed, Livedoor spots show up with a Livedoor icon.
Jordi - FON

Like others, I have an old (Linksys) FON router and a Fonera. The Fonera is always on, but the Linksys is off because of power and cabling considerations. The Fonera would be even more fun if my Nokia E70 worked reliably through it and if the DNS server inside the Fonera could deal with SRV requests (which the E70 needs to locate its SIP proxy, incidentally). Since the Fonera has a separate private SSID, my wife and I depend on it for connectivity inside the house.
It took more than a year until the first time that another Fonero used my hotspot, but since a few months ago it happens regularily. So be patient, fellow foneros!
When our family leaves for a vacation, it is sometimes hard to resist the temptation to turn off the Fonera, cable modem, Ethernet switch, VoIP gateway, DECT phone, etc., using the Big Switch to save energy. But since I know that other people sometimes use my Fonera, I guess I’ll find a way to leave it and the broadband router and Fonera running. This would be easier if the Fonera had an Ethernet port, because then I wouldn’t need the Ethernet switch between my cable modem and the Fonera (so that I can still connect the children’s desktop PC, which diesn’t have Wifi).

Simon, if you need a Fonera with an Ethernet port you should get the Fonera+. I ordered a Fonera for my dad two weeks ago, only to find out last week that he doesn’t have a router/switch, only a normal cablemodem. An extra warning for this situation (”No router/switch? Buy an Fonera+!”) during the ordering process would be welcome.

There must be a certain number of people (though I’d have no idea how many, the guy with the radius hack can give you an idea) who bought a Fonera with the intent of hacking it eventually. It’s a really nice bit of hardware but it’s closed up so that it can’t do some of the things it’s capable of doing. Maybe, at least for these people, the approach is wrong.

Could FON provide a package (or set of packages) for a vanilla OpenWRT that would provide the Fonera functionality on top of whatever else the user wanted to do with their router?

Or could FON provide a more open system that allowed users to add functionality as long as the service wasn’t interrupted? Or a repository of approved add-on packages?

I try to keep mine active one way or another. I’ve given several away to family and friends in the hopes they would provide a good home for them. Most are active, only one has ever earned any money. It seems that in sub-urban and rural USA at least so many people already have access of some kind that there’s no need for FON. The one that did get some visits was in an apartment building with mostly young students and the Fontenna was pointed at another similar apartment building.

My guess is that marketing these things to individuals is not going to be profitable in the US generally but marketing them as a solution for small / medium business may prove to be much more effective. Say, for instance, if a local cafe had a Fonera and gave out a daily guest password on receipts. Then legitimate guests could use their WiFi free and others in range could buy a FON pass. A contract with a major restaurant or department store chain could also be effective. Or a contract with a mall.

Or better yet a contract with an ISP. Make a Fonera with a DSL or Cable modem built in and win a contract or two.

Dramatically increasing range somehow would also help. 802.11n may be the only way.

When I was in Madrid for the Mono Summit I couldn’t find a single FON access point. We were in the city center (between Gran Via and Lavapies) but expected we’d see at least one usable access point. Sorry for not stopping by HQ, it was a little out of the way. Probably next time, if there is one.

I work at a callcenter supporting dsl router and modems. There are customers who shut down their internet router after ending their pc internet session, because e.g. they want to have control about being online or e.g. because they are used to modems.

A lot of customers even don’t know what the signs on the router mean. They control their internet connectivity by the success of loading a web page. These customers _if_ they should have a fon box don’t understand the internet technique at all.

In the end I am convinced that there are a lot of people who don’t understand their fon box because they don’t understand how internet and being online works.

Have a good lought about this women: She phones me and says, wlan connection does not work anymore. She had just arrived home from holidays and at her motel she happily used wlan connetion to the internet. Surprisingly not at home. I asked which router she owns. She couldn’t say. Later on I found out, she had a router without wlan - she bought the laptop because the sales man told her she could have internet connection via wlan everywhere. She was not told or she had not understood that she must be in the range of a wlan access point, nor she knew, what a wlan access point is.
She really thought wlan was a service like radio broadcasting available everywhere.

I recently started a local wireless community network and wasn’t able “adapt” the LaFonera to it, not even with freewlan, freifunk or francofon addons (maybe too technical for me). Since I only use a desktop PC at home, I won’t give up my AP’s only RJ45 port, and am definitely not buying a switch just for that purpose.
I did propose a possible “evolution” for Fon’s firmware and even business model (http://boards.fon.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=4027), but apparently FON has moved away from this possibility earlier on. No options left for me, except the too expensive ones.
BTW, I have no laptop or portable wi-fi device, I’m no Bill and will lose nothing but the money spent on the fonera (around €8) and the ability to provide internet access to those neighbours who can’t/won’t install DSL.

Jordi - FON ,La Fonera+ is too expensive for a router with only 1 LAN port(+ 1 WAN port).With that money you can buy a Linksys WRT54G,and the linksys has 4 Lan ports,and is linux based!

Martin,
When i say that users are limited by FON firmware,i mean at the fact that the user haven’t full access to his FON router,telnet,ssh are closed by default,so the user must apply some triks to have access to many funtions in his box!
I hope that in the future you will leave the “doors” open to the routers,so the users can personalize their routers by them needs!

Hi Martin,
I have measured the energy consumption of the Fonera and the fritz box. With the actual firmware and the energy-management turned on the fritz box consumes about the same amount of energy but provides much more functionality. Functionality I need (telefone, lan-ports, printer and other hardware sharing, faxbox functionality, mailboxes), so I have to run it anyway. So the Fonera has to run (and consume Energy) additionaly just for no one connecting. Even though I placed it at a high point near the window the signal does not seem strong enough to really reach far enough through the neighbourhood. Reading the comments and the German Community forums I get the impression that this is a problem many people have. Hardly anyone using the hotspot and not finding one when needed. Don’t get me wrong, I think the Fon-idea is great and I also realise you try to improve. But at the moment I am skeptical. I really like to see firmware additions for the Fritz Box and other popular routers. At the moment a lot of other routers provide more functionality than the fonera and therefore can not be replaced by the Fonera. Then it would be great if Fon would just distribute signal-boosting equipment for the fonera-firmware enhanced routers.

Eric, with just a cable/modem and no router/switch you can still install your Fonera 1.0 straight to your cable/modem either using Fix IP provided by your ISP or PPPoE with your ISP credentials. The La Fonera+ is only suggested if you need, besides WiFi, an Ethernet connected device.
Jordi - FON