FON doubled in size in the last 90 days and customer care is swamped. We have 4000 unanswered requests. I know this is going to sound crazy to Americans, but one of the reasons why we have such a backlog is that in Europe there are this extremely unusual data protection laws that make it hard (not impossible, but hard) to outsource customer care. This laws don´t allow a company to share its confidential data with another company who may, for example, provide customer care.

In the meantime I designed this little poll to understand the main problems that people who have not connected the Foneras are having around the world. A more formal e mail survey will be conducted by FON as the vast majority of the FONeros don´t know my blog.

Thanks Business 2.0!

I am pleased to announce that Debitel and FON will start working together to grow the FON WiFi network, so Debitel customers with Nokia and other WiFi phones can call and surf for free when they find Fon WiFi. This offer will make it easier for mobile customers to choose Debitel over competitors and will help FON grow its network.

FON has also released today its first Symbian client for Nokia handset that makes it easier for Nokia WiFi phones to connect to FON.

I am concerned about us at FON providing the best service that we can to FONeros that here it goes. If you have any problem with with your La Fonera installation, please write it here as a comment to this post and I promise to read it and try to do something about it.

Problems can include things like “I have not received my Fonera”, “I tried to install it and could not make it work”, “I got only the myplace network, but not FON”, “I tried to register in the maps, but I could not get my address correctly in the map”, “I disconnected the Fonera, because it only has one Ethernet port and I only had one cable”, “I connected it, but could not put it near a window because my router is too far from any windows”, or you have not found time to start connecting it, or anything else you would like to say.

Now over 100,000 Foneras were so far connected successfully, but that still leaves tens of thousands that were delivered during the last weeks not connected and I would really like to get a sense of what is going on and help out. Think about it, did you ever want to complain all the way straight to the CEO? Now you can and your complaint will be public and in my blog.

Get a Free Fonera!

Disclosure: Skype is an investor in FON. Microsoft maybe somehow involved with FON one day , but in spite of the different meetings we have had we have not made any deals. Google is an investor in FON. I am the founder of FON.

Now here’s my view on video calling . . .
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Thanks Bernard Tyers for explaining so clearly how to make the new Nokia Tablet (which I have and love) work with FON.

Happy Lunar New Year from the FON team! We wish everyone a healthy and successful year of the Pig.

When we started FON, USA was our number one country, but it soon fell behind other countries, as far back as to position number 6 in the world, after Germany, Spain, Korea, Japan and France.

For a while we did not seem to find the right management, nor strategy. But recently, thanks to the great job of our new US management team headed by our US CEO Joanna Rees, a proven entrepreneur involved with many companies, probably the most relevant being Danger, and Faisal Galaria, our head of US biz dev, formerly at Skype, USA is back at position numero uno with around 40K registered FONeros and around 20K Foneras ordered.

In March, we expect to be able to report that FON is the largest WiFi network in the States by number of locations. Congratulations Joanna and Faisal, u rule!!!