After the great news of having signed our second large ISP in Europe we have been meeting with US Cable operators. The meetings have been quite positive. Our proposition to these players is simple. We show them how with Fon they can increase ARPU (payments from Aliens increase their revenues per connection), reduce churn (clients who travel frequently now keep the service because they pay at home and use it everywhere), increase customer satisfaction (service is delivered with wifi and customer pays same rates but gets free global roaming), reduce leeching by non paying customers (Fon is shared for free only among paying customers of ISPs) and become quasi mobile and eventually with software upgrade mobile operators (their plant has very thorough coverage and with 802.11n or MIMO the range would end up in ubiquitous signal). Moreover since Fon is a global proposition with Fon US Cable operators many of which are very local become part of a global network. I am confident that in less than 120 days we will be able to announce deals similars to the ones we are making in Europe in the States.

Jazztel is the second largest publicly traded telecom company in Spain. I founded this company in 1998. I ran it until 2002. Jazztel is now managed by very able entrepreneur Leopoldo Pujals, best known as founder of Telepizza, a huge pizza chain present in 5 countries and by far the largest of its kind in Spain. I am pleased to announce that Fon and Jazztel reached an agreement today in which Jazztel will start selling its services Fon Ready. This is the second such announcement after our agreement with Glocalnet in Sweden. Both Jazztel and Glocalnet are leading challengers to the incumbent telcos, Telefonica and Telia. Why do ISPs sign up with Fon? In telco lingo, because we increase their ARPU and reduce their CHURN. For the layman this means that we increase revenues per line and increase customer retention. And all this at no cost to the ISP as FON pays for all the software integration and software addition to the ISP wifi routers. Fixed line ISPs never thought that they too could become high bandwidth wireless broadband players, with FON they can and they become members of a global alliance a la GSM that does so. If you are with an ISP anywhere in the world please contact me through this blog.

I met Alex Liu from Atheros this morning. Atheros manufactures its WiFi chips and then sells them to different brands.

In the following pictures you can see the routers they build with this chip and are sold to the public by Belkin.

The greatest thing about the Atheros chip is that it is tiny, and therefore the products associated with them are also very small. This pictures show a wifi phone that we could have in the market for 70 dollars or euros, and a router that we can buy and sell for 25. The router would be the same on the inside, but would definitely have a Fon design.

article on FON.

This morning I was looking at the latest registered fonero numbers. Foneros are people who sign up with Fon and would like to share bandwidth. If they want to do this for money they are Bill foneros, if they want to do this in order to obtain free wifi roaming anywhere else in their country or the world where there are foneros they are called Linus foneros. Now as you can see from this list Fon is becoming a very global company, ¿or is it? Considering that Muslims make one person in 5 in this planet, how come we already have foneros from so many countries and none from Muslim countries?
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We are growing fast. We were 12 people at the beginning of the year, we are 29 now, we will be 40 soon. We need a controller. Nationality is not an issue, good level of English is. Our controller needs to have budgeting and transactional experience. Has to be VERY hands on, a spread sheet wiz. Job is in sunny Madrid. Please send cvs to Antonio Fuentes.

Today we were covered by Business Week.

We signed with 2 more large telcos in Europe but we can´t yet announce who they are.

Today we started negotiating with our first mobile operator. Making a deal with them would be a breakthrough as many analysts argued that we could make deals with fixed operators but that mobile operators will hate us. Some however seem to be realizing that at the pace we are growing we can become a great way for them to alleviate the heaviest mobile traffic, videos, games and songs in particular which 3G networks are poorly equipped for. Also for indoor coverage.

By now we have had meetings and conversations will most American telcos and cable operators.

I will be in the States again from tomorrow until the following Wed evening.

Fon is a company, but Fon is also a movement. Fon has a for profit part, the bills and the aliens, and a free environment, the one for the linuses. And I am happy to see that there are so many people who want to see wifi everywhere and free for linuses become a reality. That´s why I am so appreciative of efforts such as Fonternet which I discovered today.

Eric, Robert, Diego and I spent the day in Milano today. It was the first day in which Fon employees went to Italy but it was amazing to see that we already have over 800 foneros in Italy and Telecom Italia only has around 1000 of their hotspots and we had NEVER been to Italy as a company (I lived in Italy when I was in college and speak Italian).

In Milano we met great people who showed tremendous interest in Fon. Basically we spent all day in a hotel room greeting Italian Foneros and people who we wanted to contact. On the unusual side we learned that Italy is one of the only countries in the world in which a significant portion of the DSL customers pay by the hour. I personally wanted to thank Stefano Vitta who has been helping us as a volunteer in Italy since we started. ¡Grazie Stefano!