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.

Jazztel is the second largest publicly traded telecom company in Spain. I founded this company in 1998. I ran it until 2002. Jazztel is now managed by very able entrepreneur Leopoldo Pujals, best known as founder of Telepizza, a huge pizza chain present in 5 countries and by far the largest of its kind in Spain. I am pleased to announce that Fon and Jazztel reached an agreement today in which Jazztel will start selling its services Fon Ready. This is the second such announcement after our agreement with Glocalnet in Sweden. Both Jazztel and Glocalnet are leading challengers to the incumbent telcos, Telefonica and Telia. Why do ISPs sign up with Fon? In telco lingo, because we increase their ARPU and reduce their CHURN. For the layman this means that we increase revenues per line and increase customer retention. And all this at no cost to the ISP as FON pays for all the software integration and software addition to the ISP wifi routers. Fixed line ISPs never thought that they too could become high bandwidth wireless broadband players, with FON they can and they become members of a global alliance a la GSM that does so. If you are with an ISP anywhere in the world please contact me through this blog.

I met Alex Liu from Atheros this morning. Atheros manufactures its WiFi chips and then sells them to different brands.

In the following pictures you can see the routers they build with this chip and are sold to the public by Belkin.

The greatest thing about the Atheros chip is that it is tiny, and therefore the products associated with them are also very small. This pictures show a wifi phone that we could have in the market for 70 dollars or euros, and a router that we can buy and sell for 25. The router would be the same on the inside, but would definitely have a Fon design.

article on FON.