In this picture you can see the way that foneros in Taiwan are installing the Fontennas. This achieves maximum street coverage.

Yesterday I found out the sad news that Earthlink pulled out of the Google Muni WiFi project. While that is bad I am glad that Google has given us so much support, because rather than Muni WiFi I believe it′s best to let citizens use their creativity to achieve coverage. While Fon has been successful working with some municipalities we have achieved most coverage working with citizens directly or with NGOs.

I was looking at my blog and found out of my dinner with Jimmy Wales founder of the Wikipedia on April 2nd of this year that I had left in draft by mistake. I apologize for that and I publish it today as it is still relevant.

My partner Hayashi-san, who runs Digital Garage, invited Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, and I for a traditional Japanese dinner last night. While we have many friends in common I had never met Jimmy Wales in person. I was pleasently surprised.
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Another old post that I had forgotten to publish.  This one from March this year.

Omotesando is to Tokyo what 5th Ave is to NYC.  “Cat street” –located in Omotesando area– has been WiFi enabled, this project was been done together with Sony and Skype.

CNS, our partner in Taiwan, did an event with a famous Game TV program. It was kind of a Cosplay party where people dressed as figures/characters of the famous game. For us it was a warm-up promotion for La Fonera+, since we will start selling it from in Taiwan in August.

As it is common in Taiwan and we had already in the past, there where 3 FON Girls in this event who introduce FON to the visitors and every visitor could vote for his (and why not her) dream FON girl. Who would you vote for?

Here are the rest of the pictures

I am very happy to announce that FON and Neuf Cegetel, which is France’s leading alternative operator, have entered the final technical phase before the launch of the new Neuf WiFi FON service in September.

This partnership with Neuf Cegetel reinforces our close ties with other major ISPs, such as Time Warner Cable, and is the first one to fully integrate an ISP’s WiFi capabilities with those of FON.

Throughout the summer, Neuf Cegetel will integrate FON’s software into all of its Neuf Boxes, which will enable all Neuf subscribers who own a WiFi Neuf Box to join the FON Community. Those users will be able to start sharing some of their Internet connection with the WiFi Community in return for free and secure access to every FON WiFi access point in France and around the world.

To join the FON Community, Neuf Cegetel subscribers will need to activate the service using the free activation wizard available for download on the Neuf and FON websites. More experienced users will be able to activate the Neuf WiFi FON service directly from the management console of their Neuf Box. Once the service has been activated, the Neuf Box will begin emitting a WiFi signal called “Neuf WiFi FON”.

If you are not a Neuf Cegetel subscriber, you can join the FON Community by purchasing the “La Fonera”, our own WiFi Router.

I live in Madrid, but I have an apartment in NYC, where I am now. It is on 57th and Park. From my NYC I can detect 32 WiFi networks. Of these, 4 are open. Of course this is a particularly dense area of NYC and even though I am on the 4oth floor there are tons of networks. I have been talking to people in NYC about Fon and many say that they do Fon without Fon, they basically leech on their neighbors. Now what I wonder is really how is it that the Cable and DSL operators in the States allowed this to happen.

In Europe they were wiser and they provide Cable and DSL services with locked WiFi. This made them more attractive and safer at a small additional expense, but in America operators wanted to save themselves the cost of providing WiFi and they created a situation in which people go mostly to Linksys and Netgear and buy WiFi routers that are open and many leave them open. Still, I don´t see how the present status quo is better than Fon teaming up with Time Warner Cable, Verizon or other operators and we are working very hard at Fon to change it.

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You can already buy it in our online shop. La Fonera+ is the latest edition of the router developed by FON and designed especially for Foneros. La Fonera+ has two ports, making it much easier to install and gives you the chance to connect wired devices to it and comes with an even easier configuration, totally intuitive.

Technical Specifications

Dimensions: 93.5 mm x 25.5 mm x 110 mm (excluding antenna)
Antenna Connector: RP-SMA connector (reverse SMA)
Antenna: External detachable antenna (1,5dBi)
Authentication: WEP 64bit/128 bit, WPA, WPA2, WPA mixed
Encryption: TKIP, AES, Mixed
Network Standard Support: IEEE 802.11b / 802.11g (up to 54 Mbps)
Ports: 1 Ethernet WAN port (10/100Mbps) for internet + 1 Ethernet LAN port (10/100Mbps) for computer connections and other devices (network printer, storage, etc.)
SSIDs: One public (named FON_AP by default) non-encrypted and one private (named MyPlace by default) encrypted with WPA-PSK

I have received comments on the post about the 15 m in which people who criticize Fon’s 15 minute registration trial as hackable, write under the names of Fon employees who supposedly criticize Fon’s policy. We did not publish these comments, of course, as they are fake.

I am sorry to see an organized attempt here, perhaps financed by 3G operators, whose intention is to discredit WiFi in general, and Fon in particular, as unsafe. This has traditionally been the attack of Microsoft on all open source (Fon is open source), namely that if you want to be safe you should use their products. As an Ubuntu user I can tell you that the opposite is true. If you want to be safe use Linux, or the Linux we embrace, which is www.openwrt.org.

The FON US Team has just sent me this video as a suprise…and it’s hysterical. I also liked this one.