2012 26
Fifi cherche WiFi – Best Fon ad ever
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
Belgacom (powered by Fon) has created an awesome campaign to advertise its fonspots. A dog called Fifi whose innate talent is to smell wifi hotspots. In the middle of 2011, we announced the agreement between Fon and Belgacom and two months ago we reached 100.000 hotspots. Nowadays, we have 300.000,.
Here you can see the video. The story would be as follows: Jean has a dog called Fifi that barks when she finds a wifi hotspot, because of Fon and its agreement with Belgacom, this virtue has turned out to be his worst nightmare as she never stops barking.
As demand for WiFi continues to grow, we are continuing to grow our network with the help of our community and partners, in fact, we’re having conversations with telcos all around the world.
Other than giving customers the benefit of being part of the world’s largest WiFi community, there are important benefits for telcos when they partner with Fon. The main one is offloading significant mobile traffic through WiFi. This is becoming increasingly important as the number of internet enabled devices is driving an important (and growing) portion of internet traffic. This is why at Fon we are proud of having the largest WiFi network in the world, with over 4.5 million hotspots. With the help of partners like Belgacom, we can grow even more, helping people stay connected regardless of their location.
2011 28
Fon partners with Belgacom
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
Today I am in Belgium to announce Fon’s partnership with Belgacom, a great company with fixed and mobile operations in a country of 11 million people. Together with the largest telco company in Belgium we will build the largest WiFi community in Belgium and extend Fon’s WiFi footprint, currently with more than 4 million hotspots all over the world. But this is not only an important day for Belgacom’s customers and Foneros. It’s an important day for Fon as it shows the world again that some of the leading telcos in the world realize that Fon can help them to provide a better mobile user experience for their customers if they join our WiFi community.
This partnership is also more proof that, as I explain in this post from 2010, operators are increasingly realizing the power of WiFi in order to provide a better user experience and to offload the enormous amount of data traffic that is
congesting their mobile networks. The growth in demand for mobile bandwidth is far outpacing the growth in capacity, with people now spending more time using mobile apps than surfing the web.
Since our first partnership with BT in the UK in 2007, interest in Fon from fixed and mobile telcos and hardware manufacturers has ballooned. In the past years we have demonstrated what we knew all along – that we can help our partners to provide a service which their subscribers appreciate… and thereby help them to reduce CAPEX, decrease churn, attract new customers, differentiate and freshen up their brand image. And today, six years after starting from scratch, we are talking to big telco incumbents in different countries. We’re thrilled to now be working with Belgacom, and though I can’t say specifically with whom Fon will partner next, I can say that this probably won’t be the last partnership we get to announce this year.
Update: here’s what the media is saying about our new partnership:
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,15194360,00.html
http://www.zdnet.be/news/129013/belgacom-rolt-4g-uit/ for my Belgian readers 🙂