In 3 days we have received over 5000 orders for Foneras from Germany and Austria. This is an enormous amount, much more than what we expected. We will be able to ship some of the Foneras next week, but not all. We apologize for the FONeros who will not receive their Foneras next week, they should get there before November 15th. We will ship on a first come first serve basis.

In any case we are extremely excited at FON about these results and want to thank all the enthusiastic new FONeros from these two countries and soon you will all have your Foneras. Please remember to connect them near an outside window.

Lately some people have been complaining that we have not disclosed the code of the Fonera. We have not done so because we have just launched the Fonera and are still working on the GPL compliance with Atheros, the chip maker. We are sorry about this delay and will probably publish the source code within a month Also we invite developers to write code for the Foneras and after certification we will include it as a choice for people to add to them.

At FON you can be a Bill and you can be a Linus. Most people are Linuses. Indeed, around 85% of the FONeros prefer to roam the world for free than to make money. But Greg, who I met at a business meeting yesterday in London, is a happy Bill. Interestingly, he is offering a service in euros in a pound economy, but British people still buy his passes.

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Before introducing the fonera promise system of growing the Fon movement, namely to go from a system based on cash in which foneros paid for their foneras to a system based on trust in which they don´t pay but commit to keep them on we were converting 1% of the unique visitors to our web sites to become foneros.
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Last night, when we announced that today we were going to change our FONero distribution system in Germany, from a system based on credit card payments to a based on trust, I said that our objective with this “demonstration” was to create the largest public WLAN/WiFi network in Germany, free for Linus FONeros (Bill and Alien FONeros have to pay 10 euros for a 5 day pass to use it).

While T-Mobile, with its 4500 access points, is still the largest WiFi network, at Fon we believe that this won´t be the case for long. Since February, when FON started, we had deployed a total of around 3000 access points. But only today we have received 1800 orders for Foneras from people in Germany. So it is likely that in the next 3 weeks we will be the largest WiFi network in Germany.

In 5 hours we will make a big announcement in Korea: we will adopt the Fonero promise system in Korea and not charge for our Foneras. As Germans, Koreans have also shown a tremendous community spirit that has led to many Fonera sales, activations and registrations in our maps. In gratitude FON has decided to move from a system based on Fonera (FON social router) sales to a system based on trust and give Foneras away for free in exchange for a simple promise to leave them on, as we are also doing tomorrow in Germany and Austria.
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