Here´s an example of a WiFi Networks screen captured near the home of Alberto, a fonero.

At Fon we believe that most urban centers in the developed world now have a wifi coverage and that as Fon becomes widely adopted we will organize some of this signal to build a global wifi network that will be free for Foneros and will cost $2 per day for Aliens (Aliens in Fon are users of WiFi who do not contribute WiFi). As of today we already had 26,000 foneros and 2500 registered Aliens. Some Fon critics have argued that there is not enough coverage in urban centers in developed countries. We think the contrary is true, that there are now too many wifi networks in many places. Personally I would be very grateful if readers could capture screens like this and send them to me at martin@fon.es. In order to capture a screen you need to do alt + print and then paste the screen onto the e mail and send it to me. If anyone is near a window in an urban center and does not capture any wifi signal I would love to know where that spot is. It would be the first open spot without signal that we hear about! At Fon we have not been able to find any densely populated area in developed countries without WiFi signal. We are also trying to understand the proportion of locked vs open networks available. Lastly we are in conversation with companies who can supply a client for us that automatically signs up foneros to Fon networks so we won´t need to first choose a Fon network and then sign up for it.

I got the latest report on fonero figures. As you can see Spain is about to lose its first place in the fonero movement. A month ago Spain was beating USA by a 4 to 1 margin. On one side I am sorry to see that our home country losing global leadership. On the other I am impressed that before we appear in US shops, in the US web sites of our partners, before we have a signed deals with any US telcos, that there´s still so much interest for Fon in the United States and all coming out of our own web site www.fon.com. UK is also pretty impressive as we don´t yet have marketing presence in the UK. Another surprising element to me is that I thought that the Bill model was going to be particularly successful in the US and the UK while the Linus modality was going to be more prevalent in Continental Europe but we have not even started the Bill model yet and these are the results. I guess there are a lot of Linuses in America, they just don´t seem to win elections 😉
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Only a few days ago we mentioned that we had free routers to give away to people in the EU who were facing busy streets. In the past I had metioned that Italians did not seem to be interested in becoming foneros. Now that situation seems to have been completely reversed. In my flickr post you can see how many requests we got from Italy.

You can see the different locations here. But while Italians were the majority we also got requests from Germany, France and other countries. We will be sending those routers in 2 weeks as soon as we get the next deliveries from Linksys who are somewhat delayed.

We are now working on designing our own router. Our plan is to stop subsidizing the Linksys router and, instead, make a deal with Linksys (or their competitors) by which you will find Fon ready routers in the shops of Europe and North America. Instead at Fon we will have our own router designed by us and sold on our web site.

These are some ideas for our own designs. These are outdoor designs and, of course, they are weatherproof.

If you live anywhere in the European Union where you face a busy street and would like to become a Bill or Linus fonero (Bills make 1 euro per user who connects to their network per day and Linuses don´t make money but get to roam the Fon network for free, both only share up to 50% of their bandwidth) please send Fon an e-mail with the view from your window (we will publish the best pictures) and your address and Fon will likely ship you a free wifi router. The offer is valid for the first 100 requests. I am also happy to report that as of today we are current with all our European orders and have at most a 48 hour delay in shipping. We are not however current in our American orders and we apologize for that. We hope to become current by the end of the month. In typical start up fashion we underestimated the demand we would have in the States. USA is now neck to neck with Spain as our number one country in the world by number of foneros. If you live in the States though and would like to send us a picture of your streetview, we will keep them for when we do a similar promotion for the States.

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.