FON USA is growing very fast and since we announced that Google, Skype, Sequoia Capital, and Index Ventures invested in FON, USA became the second largest country in terms of registered foneros. In order to manage and accelerate this growth we have hired Juergen Urbanski as lead US fonero.

Juergen has a B.A. (Hons.) from the European School of Business (ESB) in Germany and an M.B.A. from The Wharton School. He worked in the past with McKinsey & Company and Network Appliance.

Welcome Juergen to the FON team!

Flickr is user generated content. Youtube is user generated content. Del.icio.us is user generated content. What is Fon? We are user generated infrastructure! Foneros buy our social routers for 25 dollars or euros or the very techie ones download our firmware and join the largest WiFi community in the world and make it larger.

Youtube is to CBS what Fon is to T Mobile. We are like “Vodafone” built by the people who turn a normally stand alone product, a wifi router into a social product and use it as the building block of a true broadband global wireless network that is free to them wherever they are. Moreover, we work over a frequency, WiFi, which is favored over 3G by makers of games (PSP, DS), laptops, PDAs, digital cameras and now iPod like players with WiFi.

Yesterday I spent the morning going over Fon´s billing software and the launch of the Bill model. So far Fon´s 39,000 foneros signed up for the Linus model as that was the only one available. In the Linus model a fonero shares some of its bandwidth to people who pass by his/her home and then gets to roam the world for free. In the Bill model a fonero is an entrepreneur who sells day passes to the Fon community and makes money doing so.

There´s been a lot of debate on how much to charge and share with the Bills at Fon and we are coming close to the conclusion that Fon will charge 2 euros or dollars per 24 hours of usage on any Fon hotspot if the Alien buys 5 days of usage but if they buy only one it will be 3 euros or dollars per day. Of this money half of it will go to the Bills who will sign up with Pay Pal from our partners at eBay in order to get paid by Fon. We are also studying the figure of the Super Bill.
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Fon is a download, but it´s a firmware download that works on very few routers currently available in the market. The problem is that around 90% of the people who download our software don´t seem to notice and seem to try to install our software in non compatible routers. We are about to change this and before we allow the download we will ask people if they have the right router. But even though we lose around 25 euros or dollars per router sold at this point we strongly recommend most but the techiest of foneros to avoid the download and just buy the plug and play router for 25 euros/dollars.

Now the good news is that we are up to 39,000 registered foneros now and that as we contact foneros who failed to download properly and explain many opt to get the router and we convert registered to active. There´s a very cool feature coming in 45 days and that is that our 3rd version of the firmware will have two SSIDs, this means that every Fon router will beam two networks, a Fon Private and a Fon Public so the two environments will be completely separate.

Yesterday in the Bay Area I had a fantastic brainstorming session with Gilles BianRosa the CEO of Azureus. If you don´t know what Azureus is and you are reading my blog you are a rara avis. 114 million people have downloaded Azureus in a world that has around 250 million broadband lines (and Azureus is kind of useless if you don´t have broadband).

Why do people download and install Azureus? For two reasons: one is to move content around the internet fast and, the second one, to share content without paying for it.
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Well, we have it. This is going to be our router.

La Fonera is in fact a nano wireless router: 72mm x 97mm x 22mm.
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Fon offered free routerslast month to the first 100 people who send us pictures showing the live in busy urban areas. These are the first 137 pictures we received, I thought they made an interesting random collection of sites. We started shipping these routers this week.

Last night I had dinner with Esther Dyson. I have known Esther for 6 years and I am proud to have her at the Fon advisory board. There are many things that I could say about Esther, her critical judgement her ability to be supportive when support is needed but tough and negative when criticism is needed. But one thing that surprises me about Esther is that because of her gender and her age she is not representative of the average users of the internet companies she is partners with.

These users are mostly male and younger and yet she has complete empathy with them. At some point in the conversation, and I don´t know if this was a freudian slip, when Dan Gillmor made a comment about her she said “I am not that kind of guy”. At risk of sounding machista I can say that she is my kind of “guy”, sharp and yet sensitive.

This is how the FT explains the Net Neutrality debate:

The rapid rise of high-bandwidth internet content, such as video, has led several telecommunications companies in the US to push for higher fees from the content providers in recent months, which could raise costs to not only established internet companies such as Google and Yahoo!, but smaller start-ups.

Advocates of “net neutrality” argue that such a move would go against the very nature of the internet, which they say has fostered innovation because its architecture is based on open and equal access. Charging content providers more, they argue, could stop tomorrow’s Googles from even starting.
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