Last week, we launched FON in France and from there, I flew to London and then to Silicon Valley. My meetings with the giants of the internet, with VC firms and makers of WiFi routers were really encouraging. I visited the headquarters of Google, of Yahoo, of Skype in London, of Netgear, of Kleiner Perkins and of Sequoia. I’d love to write about my meetings and conversations there but I simply can’t right now. I know I said that it was my intention to blog the making of FON but at this point I think that if I do blog it I will end up blogging the UN making of FON! For now, all i can say is that our plan do build a global standard to share WiFi is going in the right direction and moving forward. We know we need money, web exposure, hardware “fon ready” presence, ISP deals, word of mouth and we are working on all those fronts at the same time.

On a more anecdotal level, what i can definitely write about is my tour of the Google headquarters which absolutely amazed me.

The Googleplex shocked me. Are you hungry? Almost everywhere you look you have sweets, snacks, cereals, candy…If you work there, you can eat for free in their cafeteria or rather, their food court that offers Italian, Mexican, North American and Asian food. You like swimming? Google as a lap swimming pool right in the middle of its Googleplex. You can also go running in their gym or work out whenever you want to during work, or you can leave your kid in the Google day care center, or you can wash your clothes in their laundry room. I have never been to a kibutz but whatever I imagine they look like…I saw at Google. When walking from one building to the other, just hop on one of their Segways. Here’s an immensely successful company working in a kid’s paradise. I just love it. Now please when you look at the pictures do remember that what you see is Google sense of humor and do not take anything seriously!

People who are interested in sharing excess bandwidth at home or work and obtaining bandwidth elsewhere have found in FON the right free wifi roaming platform and are downloading our software. But is FON doable? How many broadband connections do we need for FON to provide reliable wifi signal around the world? Surprisingly not that many. Nowadays the largest hotspot networks, T Mobile, Boingo, The Cloud, Orange, Vodafone, have fewer than 20,000 hotspots each. FON just launched and we have had over 1000 downloads in a week. That is 5% of the largest wifi hotspot networks. Skype to give an example of a much more established platform has around 150,000 downloads per day for a total so far of 200 million according to their site. But while FON is more complicated than Skype to download many less foneros are needed for FON to give a great wifi experience than skyperos to give Skype a great user experience. For Skype to succeed millions of people need to be on Skype. But one fonero can give coverage to half a city block and that is equivalent to thousands of people who live or pass by. Our estimates are that 1 million foneros around the world or around 1% of the people would be enough to give a global wifi signal. An ambitious but reachable goal.

Here´s a list of many routers. The key about FON is that it work on wifi routers that are LINUX based. In this link you find more information. That a router may work with FON does not mean that it works with the current download. FON is a new company and we launched with only Linksys Linux enabled routers. But it is our objective to go through the list of the most popular Linux enabled routers and have them available to foneros around the world.