USA is by far our number one country in the world in number of Foneros. We have so many opportunities in the States, that I decided to take advantage of the European summer break and go to the States for a month beginning July 11th. I will first go to the Allen and Co conference in Sun Valley, then to the Bay Area for 2 weeks and then to the NYC area for 10 days.

I have already planned meetings with many telcos, ISPs, content companies, technology companies, our investors Google and eBay and others. It should be a lot of fun. So while I will not get a vacation, I promised my wife and 3 kids that I will work weekdays from 9 to 4 and rest will be with them. Let´s see if this works out.

Family vs work, the TOUGH balance. In any case if you would like to meet with me vis a vis FON pls write contact me and I see what I can do.

Making 3G/WiFi phones, make voice calls through SIP or SKYPE, and paying a tiny fraction of what these calls cost over 3G/GSM, is the holy grail of contemporary telephony. Especially, when these calls can be made not out of a geeky WiFi phone, but from your regular Nokia phone. So when I got the Nokia E61, the Nokia Blackberry Killer let´s say, and saw that EVERY time you made a phone call it asked you if you wanted to make a GSM call or a SIP call, I was really excited.

The challenge was that I could not get this to actually work, nor could anyone at FON for a while. Indeed, the problem appeared so complex that it became an interview question for me. Software engineers showed up for interviews and I gave them the phones to program as a test. Nobody could do it until Anthony Aubry of France got it to work this afternoon not only by doing everything that had to be done to the phone (it´s ABSURDLY complex), but by using Free as the SIP provider, which for some unknown reason worked while the other SIP providers we tried failed (this has to be fixed, because our partner in France is Free´s competitor Neuf!).

Also, we are eagerly waiting for the Symbian version of Skype, so calls can be made with Nokias and Skype. But in the meantime, I have my Nokia working thanks to Anthony and this is his recipe.
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When we use WiFi, we are rich at home. We have our signal. We rule. When we leave home with our WiFi gadgets, we become WiFi beggars. “Please give me WiFi”, we ask as we look for signals we can use. But once you have FON you are not a WiFi beggar anymore. You pay at home and you take your signal through others. You roam the world for free and it is your right to do so, because you are allowing others to do the same at your home.
along the way.
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I apologize for the high shipping charges we have to some European countries. We are working on reducing those.

I apologize to all of those who want to be FONeros in Asia and still can´t get the routers for $5/€5. What happened is that we alocated a certain amount of routers to Asia, started selling them in Korea and sold so many that we simply ran out. My apologies and do expect social routers in many places in Asia subsidized by FON as soon as Accton, our manufacturing partners, can deliver them which I estimate will be in mid August.

I apologize for early FONeros who are having to reflash their routers. New versions of our software can be udpated from FON, so those problems should be over to new buyers, but my apologies to early FONeros trying our early beta versions.

I apologize to those who have trouble getting help from FON. We build a company to be the largest WiFi network in the world by year end (around 25K foneros) and not over 60K now. We are doing what we can, but we apologize.

FON has opened two research labs, one in Barcelona and one in Paris. The lab in Barcelona is working in the FON Downloader: the new version of our social router that will also address an issue that is dear to people who frequently upload and download, and that is a FON social router that can be directly connected to your iPod or external hard drive and that allows you to separate your uploading downloading activities in bittorrent, youtube and other sites from your computing activity. We believe we can have this product in the market for around $50.

In Paris we are working on managing our relationship with many other open source companies and doing projects in common. These will be announced in the next 30 days. Now here´s a general commentary. In Europe, most people don´t want to move and companies must go to them. In America, most people move to where the companies are. So FON is decentralizing and making small labs in different cities. We would like to do our next one in Asia.

At FON we are not as crazy about Bluetooth as we are about WiFi, but now that phones like the Nokia E61 or N80 have Bluetooth and WiFi, we see a great opportunity to create a Symbian version of FON and we are going for it.
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Now that we are becoming big I am getting comments from people who are turned off by our “Spanish leftist” look. I hear them, but I am not planning to change our image. FON is a telco revolution, FON is made of people who are fed up of the slow speed and the high monopolistic charges of the mobile operators and want to see free WiFi succeed. FON is user generated infrastructure: you give up some of your wireless bandwidth at home and you get it back anywhere else in the world without having to pay extra. You roam the world for free.

FON is people who have been promised the wireless internet and got tired of waiting. And that to me, is progressive. Why should it not express our views? And as a CEO, why can´t I express my views? I believe CEO´s CAN and SHOULD be political, because CEOs are citizens and all citizens should be political. So here´s a random list of things I believe in.
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