2005 15
There´s something wrong about FON in Italy
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
I don´t get it. I speak Italian. I love Italy. But so far, we have requests for FON from all the important countries in the world except Italy. Since FON has been disseminating over the blogosphere I wonder if Italy is somehow disconnected from the blogosphere in other languages. How can we get so much interest in Germany, Sweden, Netherlands and France and not in Italy?
2005 15
FON is LIVE
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www.fon.com has gone live but is in Spanish. Sorry. It will soon be in English. Now if you know some Spanish you can already sign up for FON and download the software. It´s free. And there´s a link in the home page in Spanish to FON´s English blog.
2005 14
Are Municipal WIFI networks a Wise Investment?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
Tomorrow we will release the FON software. With this software download and a Linux enabled access point, anybody can turn their wifi access point into a hotspot and choose to either charge (the BILL mode) or share (the LINUS mode). Now reading about municipal wifi networks I wonder. After we release the FON software, should cities continue spending money to build wifi networks? Aren´t wifi networks already built by private individuals, but because of a lack of a unifying software such as FON´s, they are now unavailable? Wouldn´t taxpayers prefer to donate part of their bandwidth at home in exchange for bandwidth elsewhere rather than pay for municipal infrastructure? I think so.
2005 13
Two deals in the making in Sweden with Glocalnet and Labs2
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The FON model works!!! Our strategy to make FON expand quickly throughout Europe and enable people who share their bandwidth to connect their wireless devices everywhere for free is picking up steam.
One aspect of this strategy is to blog the idea, so when the software is online next week in “Linus version”, Linuses can download the software and start sharing their bandwidth between eachother. We already have 1500 subscribed users for next week’s launch. The other aspect is to start making deals with ADSL operators. Like I said before, we’re close to an agreement with Jazztel.
In Sweden, I made two oral agreements that we hope to sign in less than a month with Glocalnet and Labs2. Telia is the Telefonica of Sweden and Glocalnet is Telia’s largest ADSL competitor while Labs2 is Telia’s largest competitor in fiber-optic access. These two companies together sell around 8500 bandwidth connections a month. The deal with them is incredibly simple: we give Glocalnet and Labs2 the exclusive right to sell ADSL and fiber optic access with FON Inside and they agree that all their WiFi sales have FON Inside.
The great thing about this is that nobody pays anyone. These companies like FON because they will tell their clients “With Telia, you pay 30 euros a month and have internet at home. With Glocalnet, you pay 30 euros a month and you have internet at home, and you can also have it at your neighbour’s house, in your city and in the whole of Europe.”
2005 13
Foneros unite!
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In Argentina, Microsoft is pronounced the english way, whereas in Spain, it’s pronounced MEE-CROSOFT. Spain is a little bit like France in that it tends to reject “imported” words or names. People will look at you awkwardly if you pronounce a foreign word the way it is supposed to sound. However, in Latin America and most countries in the world, foreign words seem to be much more accepted and people will try to pronounce it correctly. In this respect,we decided at FON that a person using FON will be a fonero, wherever that person’s from and whatever language that person speaks. I think for most people, there’s something romantic about Spanish, and FON members will like the name fonero. In fact, people are starting to pick it up. Just the other night, at the big SIME party, lots of Swedes came up to me and told me “I want to be a fonero!”. That made my day.
2005 11
Sweden, India and FON
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I find the tremendous acceptance of FON in Sweden surprising. Here we are in one of the world´s most advanced technology islands and yesterday at SIME, when I was done talking about FON (you download my powerpoint presentation here), somebody asked for a show of hands and around 70% of the audience wanted to become fonero. In other words, download our software which will be available on Monday and build the wifi nation. I thought that here, in the land of affordable 3G, people would prefer that choice. But the comments at SIME were so negative on 3G and so favorable on wifi that the whole thing made my day. Interestingly, I was approached by an Indian woman who wants to do FON in India. In India, FON is all about using wifi to reach many at a low cost, say a lot of mini Bills, in fonero language. But in Sweden it´s about Swedish people with the latest wifi enable gadgets wanting to find wifi signal everywhere. And they loved it when I said that the wifi nation already exists, that no additional expenditure is needed but the making of it with a clever piece of software. The largest hotspots networks in the world have less than 20,000 hotspots, T Mobile is a good example. Next Tuesday when we put our software on the net we don´t know what may happened but we believe that the chaos of random downloading may beat the central planning of large corporations and yield in a reasonable time the largest wifi network in the world.
2005 11
Our Strategy vis a vis ISPs
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Our strategy vis a vis ISPs around the world is the same as the one in Spain. We want to team up with an ISP in a market and allow only that ISP to sell their DSL/Cable services with FON Inside. All others who want to be foneros, of course, can download our soft, buy the right routers (if they don´t have a Linux), enable wifi access point and get going with FON. But we think it´s easier to team up with one ISP who will make this simple claim to the potential customer. With our competitor you pay 30 euros per month for bandwidth and you get bandwidth at home. With us you pay the same 30 euros, but you get bandwidth all over the world for free! We have FON INSIDE.
2005 11
No deal with Swisscom
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We finally did not reach an agreement with Swisscom, so shares in FON are still mostly with me except some that we are distributing in the form of a stock option plan to top foneros who help us out around the world.
2005 10
FON in Sweden
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Tomorrow, we’re launching FON in Sweden. Right now, I’m at the SIME scandinavian conference on the Internet. Sweden is an interesting case because people here are fascinated with the idea of FON, but not because you can earn money through FON nor because you can save money. Here, bandwidth is very large and very cheap. What Swedes seem to really like in FON is the idea of having a unified WiFi network with large bandwidth. They say that 3G was simply not good enough. There are companies here that offer fiber-optic connections in your home at speeds of up to 100Mb for only 30 EUR. Una locura, as we say in spanish. These are the only connections I’ve seen where the bottle neck is WiFi at 54 Mb.
This Friday, i asked to have a demonstration on how it is to surf at those speeds. For me, it’s a little like someone who’s going to go for a spin in a Ferrari.
2005 10
We did it!!!
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We finally managed to buy www.fon.com !!! It’s not that i didn’t like www.fon.es (and to be sure, it’s perfect for Spain) but if we want to go global, www.fon.com is essential.