2006 9
Dan Frommer at Forbes, please be more patient!
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
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.
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Ricardo Domingues on February 12, 2006 ·
Most people are afraid of what they don’t know and it seems Dan Frommer didn’t take time to find out what FON is all about. It seems like he’s too shortsighted to understand that FON is actually going to generate ISPs additional revenues from roaming users. ISPs already get a monthly fee from their clients, by partnering with FON, they’ll also get additional revenues from roaming users. Basically ISPs are going to be able to sell their bandwidth twice. Isn’t this a good deal Dan?
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Karl-Friedrich Lenz on February 10, 2006 ·
Dan Frommeris accusing FON of freeriding, saying “hop on a connection someone else has already paid for”.
That is not correct.FON users hop on connections they have paid for themselves, not on connections someone else has paid for. There is no freeriding involved here.