Sometimes chaos is better than order

I was thinking this morning why it was that Swisscom, Telefonica and T-Online, who have tried to set up their own WiFi networks, failed in their endeavour and why I think FON will be successful at it.

The best explanation I came up with is that chaos is sometimes better than order. Let me explain: a telecom engineer would never plan the kind of network FON is going to have. When you see that thousands of volunteers who have signed up and sent us their email addresses, objectively, the FON network can be seen as chaotic and random.

An engineer who designs networks for a telecom wants the best possible coverage with the smallest number of access points and won’t even try to aim for coverage where there is no market. At FON, however, we are putting in motion a movement in which access points that already exist all sync together and form a same network. Telecoms as we know them work like governments and we work like civil society. What is our advantage? The same advantage the market has over planning. Juantomás García puts it this way: “Imagine you had to plan the distribution of all the food that enters Manhattan in one day. Not even the most efficient government could plan the distribution of the amazing variety of Japanese, Chinese, Italian, French, Jewish, Latino, Oriental and North American food that is eaten every day in the Big Apple. Millions of individuals taking individual decisions are the ones who make it happen.”. This is why, with extremely basic marketing (basically, this blog and other blogs), without any internet infrastructure and with very simple but very clever software, FON will be able to build what billions of dollars spent by telecoms couldn’t: a WiFi nation.

In Spain, there’s already broadband for everyone, the problem is that it’s very badly distributed. To give and to receive (Linuses) or to share and to charge (Bills) is the solution to this absurd situation. From chaos, we can reach order.

• chaos
• Fon
• telecoms
• wifi nation