I just came back from the FON party. It´s 3am in Madrid (our one year birthday party was wild) and I find out that our servers sunk due to ENORMOUS demand for Foneras from the States. This is because many blogs linked to our offer that we were giving them away for free for our birthday.

We know that thousands of people who tried to get the Foneras got rejected by our site. We apologize. We just never had so much demand in our history as a company and we were simply not ready to take so many orders per hour. We were not really able to add capacity tonight in Madrid, but now so many people got rejected and gave up that the ones who come in are getting through and are getting their Foneras.

I feel bad about this cause it´s unfair. Those who came first did not get them and those who come now do. Don´t know how to fix that. But now it´s working fine.

Follow Martin Varsavsky on Twitter: twitter.com/martinvars

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Zach Owens on February 7, 2007  · 

I sent an email to my entire company telling everyone about the offer. We may have contributed a small part to the demand, but hopefully we will have more FON hot spots in Maui soon!

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Martin Varsavsky on February 7, 2007  · 

Thank you Zach, now it works!

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jbs on February 7, 2007  · 

Guys, and when will you do a offer like this for Portugal? We could really use a decent wifi infrastructure here!
PS: I already have two routers, a fonera and a wrt54 running fon firmware, so I can provide wifi to the streets on both sides of my house…

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Martin Varsavsky on February 7, 2007  · 

Jbs,

We can send u 10 foneras if u promise to connect them through your buddies

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Christopher on February 7, 2007  · 

Well, it did take me 6 hours, but I finally got through the 4 order pages at about 23.30 last night :oD

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jbs on February 7, 2007  · 

I’m already pressing my buddies to get foneras – at least one of the 176 Portuguese on the Om Malik giveaway was a friend of mine. I’m also pressing another to accept the fonera I tried to offer him with the “fonero gets fonero” campaign. But most people here seem to need a big media campaign to do anything.
I’ll check this week if I can get 10 volunteers – do you mind if I post on my blog about it?

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Martin Varsavsky on February 7, 2007  · 

Yes jbs,

Of course you can blog about it.

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Kasper on February 7, 2007  · 

That rocks on so many levels – I received my fon a little while ago, and I already love the concept to pieces! Martin, please continue to seed Foneras in Denmark (and the rest of Scandinavia for that matter… we really need to liberate and democratize WiFi here) 🙂

All the best,

Kasper

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jbs on February 8, 2007  · 

Thanks, I’ve just sent a email to a few friends. If I don’t have 10 “would be” foneros tomorrow, I’ll put it in my blog too.

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euronerd on February 8, 2007  · 

jbs,
please share your blog url with us !!

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jbs on February 8, 2007  · 

Lol… I think I won’t be able to post anything on the blog, until now I have 5 requests already (one from the guy to whom I had sent my “fonero gets fonero” invitation, it seems he had deleted it without reading).
But you’re in Portugal too, euronerd?

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jbs on February 9, 2007  · 

Martin,
I already have 8 “foneros to be”, so the other 2 should be no problem too (a couple of them have friends that are interested).
You have my email, you can contact me there, but I’d rather you emailed me at jose dot rodrigues dot silva at cgd dot pt (webmail is blocked here at work), so we can arrange the delivery of the foneras.

3.0 rating

japan user on February 9, 2007  · 

Japanese form includes a fatal bug.
bug is found out for two weeks, but it is not revised at all.
Contents of a bug cannot perform setting in Japanese.
I demand early correspondence

3.0 rating

Richard on February 10, 2007  · 

We have published news about fon in the newspaper in singapore and had posted the fonera 1 year anniversary link to the forums.

A pity that singapore is not in the shipment venue and we are consolidating shipment from US to singapore.

Thanks for the movement

3.0 rating

jbs on February 12, 2007  · 

Marin,
I’ve sent the list to Mónica… Soon there will be ten more foneros in Portugal!

3.0 rating

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