2005 19
FON WIFI and ISPs around the WORLD
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
We have been contacted by different ISPs around the world, many coming through our Fonero leaders in different countries. We are making our first deals with Glocalnet in Sweden and Jazztel (which I founded) in Spain to be FON ready. These two companies combined sell over 3000 new dsl wifi connections per day, which means many new FON hotspots per day launched. We are also beginning negotations in the USA and France.
Our strategy vis a vis ISPs is simple. FON will provide our software free of charge to all the ISPs who would like to sell their services FON ready. Why would ISPs want to do this? For two reasons. The first one is that while before you are FON ready your offer is something like “a ton of bandwidth for very little money”, after you are FON ready your offer is “pay for bandwidth at home and roam the world for free with FON” (Linus) or “milk your wifi” (Bill). For the consumer is the same 20/30 euros/dollars per month but the offer is radically improved at 0 extra cost to you, the ISP. Now the OTHER very important reason for ISPs to sell their dsl/cable/wifi routers FON ready is that FON shares revenues made from ALIENS (users of FON hotspots) with the ISPs so you can turn all your customers into additional revenue sources for you, the ISP. And of course the time has come to forget about all the business plans to build a hotspot network. The largest hotspot networks in the world have less than 20,000 hotspots. With the sales of Jazztel and Glocalnet and a few other ISPs plus the spontaneous downloads that started this week at our site, we can have more FON hotspots in a few months than T Mobile, Boingo, The Cloud, etc.
FON and its ISP partners will be magnets for wififons applications, for Nintendo, Sony wifi devices, digital cameras with wifi, mp3 players with wifi, etc. It´s time to build the global mobile internet. First with wifi and later, when available, with wifi/wimax routers at people´s homes. If you are an ISP we can get you started in a week. Please contact me at martin@fon.com to get an information package.
2005 18
¿Can Politics be more Competitive than Business?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
At FON we are using the tactics of democracy in business. We are, for example, planning to run city wide elections among foneros to select our city managers instead of going to headhunters to find us the right person. Also at FON, at least so far, we don´t advertise and we don´t have a PR firm. As in the world of politics, at FON we speak, or in our case, we blog.
Now, as I look further into the political process of well functioning democracies (yes, they do exist!) I am surprised by one finding. Democratic politics seem to produce more competitive behaviour than business practices. Take, for example, the case of mobile phone pricing in Europe and the obvious collusion that exists among the three to four leading operators in each country on fixed to mobile rates and on roaming rates. At the same time, compare this monopolistic behavior, so prevalent among three to four players per country, to the tremendous competition that exists on almost every issue between Labor and Conservatives in the UK or between Partido Popular and PSOE (the socialists) in Spain.
Why is it that two political parties can behave more competitively than three to four mobile phone companies? The answer, in my view, lies in the different types of monopolies that politics and business creates. Democratic politics is in a way a quasi monopoly on government…that is temporary. Therefore you either win and have almost all the power (Aznar before the last election in Spain) or lose and have practically no power (Aznar now). In this type of scenario, competition for obtaining the monopoly right to power is fierce. But when companies can do well colluding, each one making huge profits and dividing the market, the number of players is less likely to have an impact on monopolistic behavior. As a result, we have an incredibly non competitive per minute pricing in the mobile phone world in Europe. And this is but one example in which corporate behavior leads to monopolistic practices. There are many others.
2005 15
There´s something wrong about FON in Italy
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
I don´t get it. I speak Italian. I love Italy. But so far, we have requests for FON from all the important countries in the world except Italy. Since FON has been disseminating over the blogosphere I wonder if Italy is somehow disconnected from the blogosphere in other languages. How can we get so much interest in Germany, Sweden, Netherlands and France and not in Italy?
2005 14
Are Municipal WIFI networks a Wise Investment?
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
Tomorrow we will release the FON software. With this software download and a Linux enabled access point, anybody can turn their wifi access point into a hotspot and choose to either charge (the BILL mode) or share (the LINUS mode). Now reading about municipal wifi networks I wonder. After we release the FON software, should cities continue spending money to build wifi networks? Aren´t wifi networks already built by private individuals, but because of a lack of a unifying software such as FON´s, they are now unavailable? Wouldn´t taxpayers prefer to donate part of their bandwidth at home in exchange for bandwidth elsewhere rather than pay for municipal infrastructure? I think so.
2005 13
Foneros unite!
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
In Argentina, Microsoft is pronounced the english way, whereas in Spain, it’s pronounced MEE-CROSOFT. Spain is a little bit like France in that it tends to reject “imported” words or names. People will look at you awkwardly if you pronounce a foreign word the way it is supposed to sound. However, in Latin America and most countries in the world, foreign words seem to be much more accepted and people will try to pronounce it correctly. In this respect,we decided at FON that a person using FON will be a fonero, wherever that person’s from and whatever language that person speaks. I think for most people, there’s something romantic about Spanish, and FON members will like the name fonero. In fact, people are starting to pick it up. Just the other night, at the big SIME party, lots of Swedes came up to me and told me “I want to be a fonero!”. That made my day.
2005 11
Sweden, India and FON
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
I find the tremendous acceptance of FON in Sweden surprising. Here we are in one of the world´s most advanced technology islands and yesterday at SIME, when I was done talking about FON (you download my powerpoint presentation here), somebody asked for a show of hands and around 70% of the audience wanted to become fonero. In other words, download our software which will be available on Monday and build the wifi nation. I thought that here, in the land of affordable 3G, people would prefer that choice. But the comments at SIME were so negative on 3G and so favorable on wifi that the whole thing made my day. Interestingly, I was approached by an Indian woman who wants to do FON in India. In India, FON is all about using wifi to reach many at a low cost, say a lot of mini Bills, in fonero language. But in Sweden it´s about Swedish people with the latest wifi enable gadgets wanting to find wifi signal everywhere. And they loved it when I said that the wifi nation already exists, that no additional expenditure is needed but the making of it with a clever piece of software. The largest hotspots networks in the world have less than 20,000 hotspots, T Mobile is a good example. Next Tuesday when we put our software on the net we don´t know what may happened but we believe that the chaos of random downloading may beat the central planning of large corporations and yield in a reasonable time the largest wifi network in the world.
2005 11
No deal with Swisscom
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
We finally did not reach an agreement with Swisscom, so shares in FON are still mostly with me except some that we are distributing in the form of a stock option plan to top foneros who help us out around the world.
2005 10
We did it!!!
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We finally managed to buy www.fon.com !!! It’s not that i didn’t like www.fon.es (and to be sure, it’s perfect for Spain) but if we want to go global, www.fon.com is essential.
2005 9
FON can become Europe’s biggest WiFi network
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
A big thank you to all the foners out there who sent us data on Telefonica, The Cloud and T Mobile hotspots.
To recap: Telefonica currently has the largest WiFi network in Spain with 900 hotspots. The Cloud has the largest WiFi network in Europe with 6000 hotspots. And finally, T Mobile has the largest WiFi network in the world with 14,000 hotposts. FON already has 1500 pre-registered foners, so this means that very soon, FON will have a larger network than Telefonica. Coupled with FON expansion in France and Sweden, FON could be the largest WiFi network in Europe by April of next year, with more than 6000 hotspots (to which Linuses will connect for free!).
2005 6
Ideas to spread the word
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in Fon with No Comments
The following are ideas that surfaced during a brainstorm with FON colleagues in France. Some already have been used in Spain and I will share them with those FON members who are interested in spreading the word.
FON sticker on your mailbox: the problem with mailboxes in apartment buildings is that they usually are packed with advertising (flyers, coupons etc…). With FON, it’s time to get even. It’s time we use our mailboxes to do our own publicity. Let’s put FON stickers on our mailboxes so that our neighbours know that they can change to FON if they’re unhappy with their ADSL provider or know that there is a Bill nearby who is ready to sell them WiFi access.
FON flags: why not make orange FON flag for Bills so they can put them at their windows and let roaming Aliens in the area know they can connect.
WiFiFONs in parks: how about a Bill who brings a couple of WiFiFONs to a park and lets Aliens in this park call back home at ridiculously low prices.
Personal FON homepage: When a fonero connects using another fonero’s connection, it would be interesting to have a FON homepage pop-up upon connection. The idea is to let each fonero have a homepage that he or she can personnalise. For example, if a fonero wants to promote an NGO, the fonero would be able to place logos and write about this NGO. Or it could be a blog, or an artist…
Sharing more than your connection: Another intesting idea is based on the fact that by definition, Linuses like to share. So why not share more than bandwidth? How about sharing your books, your DVDs, your playstation games, etc.? Sharing with FON would have a much broader sense whereby FON members would not only share digitally but also share physical objects they can either deliver at another FON member’s doorstep directly or through the post.