Rebecca Buckman from the Wall Street Journal wrote an article on today´s WSJ in which she questions the validity of FON´s advisory board members comments on their blogs about FON. I think Rebecca is right in one point and wrong in another one. Rebecca Buckman is right in saying that readers who go over comments written by a blogger who is also an advisory board member of FON should be warned that these comments are coming from people associated with the company. But Rebecca is wrong in saying that these warnings had not been made. I for example have been frequently blogging about each of the advisory board members and all of them individually had blogged about their involvement with Fon. There was no secret there and Rebecca should have researched this more thoroughly. And in any case having spoken with Rebecca quite a few times my take on this is that Rebecca, representing old media found it tough to accept that the announcement of the FON funding deal first came out on my blog and then in her paper the venerable WSJ. Sorry Rebecca but part of the appeal of FON, other than its service is that we are a blogged company and in any case I would not have announced the FON deal in a publication that requires its readers to pay to access its content on the internet. Other than that I would like to say that I love the new format of the WSJ in Europe. It´s so much easier to carry and to read than the old one!

There are many municipal Wi Fi projects around the world. These projects involve getting weather proof Wi Fi hotspots and installing them around the cities. At FON we believe that the best solution for a city is not a pure hotspot solution. Instead we believe that the best solution is citizens of a city with FON routers by a window combined with some hotspot investments on behalf of the city in key locations. We have been talking already to a number of cities whose names unfortunately we cannot yet disclosed and the reception has been great. The key here is that behind the municipal wifi movement there´s a war going on with the telecom operators on one side and the cities on the other. But with FON both cities and telecom operators win. Cities win because residents put their routers by their windows and provide free roaming to each other only after PAYING the telecom operators. And operators win because they get more customers and because they make more revenues as non residents pay to use the networks. FON then is either a free network for residents and a paid network for non residents. But the prices for non residents or aliens like we call them, coming at $2 a day, are very, very reasonable. $2 per day is a price that is not low enough to encourage you not to sign up with a telecom operator if you are a resident (as bandwidth costs less than $60 per month) but it is low enough for visitors into a city to feel that if they want wifi they can get it everywhere for a very reasonable amount.

I just read Forbes article on us. I understand Dan´s views but I am not sure he understands ours. When Dan contacted me I was on route from San Francisco to London where I recently landed only to see his article on line. I wish Dan Frommer was a more patient journalist and had given me 24 hours to reply.

Dear Dan, I am the founder of three ISPs, Viatel, Jazztel and Ya.com and believe me FON is not only not against the ISPs, FON is a boom for ISPs that will generate more broadband clients and more ARPU. FON invests in a wifi platform that is provided for free to ISPs so they can sell wifi roaming as a feature at no cost to them. And on top of that FON makes ISPs realize that they are seating on untapped potential extra revenue (payments from aliens) that we uncover and share with them. We know that some ISPs have terms of service that prevent users from becoming foneros. We do not want to encourage anybody not to respect these terms. We are instead working with ISPs so they endorse FON´s wifi roaming platform and then foneros sign up.

I have been reading articles on FON that call us the P2P of WiFi or the Napster of WiFi. What these writers fail to understand is that my whole career was built in the ISP world having started Viatel, Jazztel and Ya.com and that I created FON as a way to build a global wifi network and boost ISP revenue. FON is great for ISPs because FON pays for all the incremental costs of roaming to the ISP, because an ISP can sell an extra feature to a customer (pay for bandwidth at home have bandwidth all over the world) at no cost to them, and because when we make revenues from aliens (non foneros) we share it with the ISPs. ISPs are seating on potential extra revenue that FON untaps for them. Indeed if you are reading this and work for an ISP please contact us and we will explain to you all the advantages of making your ISP FON ready.

Got the initial figures. They are amazing. We made more foneros in one day, yesterday, than since we started the company. As of last night we had close to 9000 registered foneros. To give you a sense of what this is the largest wifi hotspot networks in the world have around 25,000 hotspots. We got 5000 registrations in one day and sold over 3000 fon routers. Our plan for 2006 is to be the largest hotspot network in the world. We are getting there. I take an opportunity here to thank the Spanish FON team, to thank Janus and Niklas from Skype, to thank the Google team, especially Megan and Christopher, to thank Mike from Cisco, Danny from Index Ventures, Mark and Mike from Sequoia, to thank our American advisory board for all the tough yet constructive criticism, to thank the blogosphere whose comments both positive and negative help us be a better company, and to thank all of those who became foneros and believe that a global, unified wifi signal can be of great benefit to all. THANK YOU!!!

I have been getting comments from people asking if we are moving to Silicon Valley as a result of our investment round. While we love the creativity and energy in the Bay Area and we have tremendous admiration for the global talent that has gathered over there, we are not moving away from Spain. We love being a Spanish technology company and we are staying in Spain. Something else. There was a misunderstanding vis a vis Speakeasy. Speakeasy allows FON but they are not our partners. Our partners are Google, Skype, Index Ventures and Sequoia quite a team as it stands!