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La Fonera from free to €29 October 29, 2006

After having received 6000 orders in Germany and Austria, the free, promised-based distribution of La Fonera routers ends next week Friday at midnight. In all other parts of the world prices will be raised from €5/ $5 to €29/ $29.95 respectively.

According to Martin Varsavsky, FON has reached its goal to get more routers out in Germany than T-Mobil has hotspots (which would be 4500). The first 1000 of these 6000 routers have already been shipped.

WiFi phones are getting more and more popular and this one proofs how popular WiFi gets as opposed to 3G. The new Samsung EW-700 only features WiFi radio but packs in quite a bit of features: VoIP telephony, web browser, 2 MP camera, messenger, camcorder, media player and Outlook sync. All applications run on a propriatary OS. The display seems to be really nice but I am not sure how much fun it is to chat without a QWERTY keyboard. See more pictures on Aving.net.

[via Engadget]

As of today, La Fonera is completely free in Germany and Austria including free shipping. Short term goal is to create the largest WiFi network in these countries. Currently T-Mobile is the market leader with 4500 APs vs. 3000 FON hotspots. Martin Varsavsky just blogged that FON had 1800 orders only today and only in Germany. It is very likely that FON will reach their goal in a matter of weeks or months, the bottleneck seems to be the pace of fullfillment (import, shipping). If this works it could be a model for other countries as well. I am still convinced New York City (Manhattan to be precise) would be an excellent place to push FON as residential and commercial areas (incl. bars, cafés, restaurants) are completely mixed and thus chances are much higher you reach potential Aliens with your FON hotspot.

French ISP Free opens all 300,000 WiFi hot spots of their users to be used by any subscriber to Free. If you have signed up with Free you can from now on roam anywhere you find a Free hotspot and make free VoIP phone calls (roaming is restricted to 64kbps). Frees set top boxes will have this feature turned on by default, all other users need to switch this on to be effective.

Is this a threat for FON? Well, I guess yes and no. In France this means some competition, no doubt. But it will also help FON. First of all, the whole free WiFi idea (or movement if you will) gets more momentum. Plus, even Free users can only roam within France whereas Foneros roam worldwide. Once you get used to it in France you might want to join FON as well to be able of taking advantage of free WiFi everywhere.

via GigaOm, Engadget

The Wi-Fi-FreeSpot™ Directory website is an excellent source for free WiFi hot spots around the world. They have special sections for US and international airports, hotels, stores and parks. Beside a detailed listing for the US you also find spots in Europe and Asia.

With Fondoo.net, launched in July this year the UK has got the first FON-friendly ISP (according to Wikipedia) that explicitly allows sharing of bandwidth either as a Bill or Linus. I spoke with Alan Bell today, the founder of Fondoo.net and he said they have had meetings with FON UK and Germany and "they were pretty positive about it all round". Fondoo.net is privately owned and financed. According to Alan Bell, Fondoo is available everywhere that ADSL is available (ADSL is running on British Telecom lines in the UK). The service starts at £17.99 for a 512k residential package including unlimited download capacity. Business packages are also available.

Free WiFi for Singapore, almost free computers October 13, 2006

Singapore announced they will offer more free WiFi throughout the island. They will increase the number of hot spots from 900 to 5,000. The free WiFi will offer 512 kb per second and will be free for at least 2 years. The government also announced to subsidize 10,000 computers for needy students (household income less then $125). Qualifying students can purchase a computer for $179.

[via Engadget, MSNBC]

Today, Martin Varsavsky spoke at ETRE 06 (European Technology Roundtable Exhibition) in Barcelona. Red Herring interviewed him yesterday. Some interesting facts were unveiled:

FON is currently in negotiations with US cable companies to team up with them to solve the "last few feet" problem, but Martin didn't really want to go into detail (see the video here)
The number of hot spots needed to make some impact was estimated to be 500,000, a real impact at 1 million (which are planned to be reached by 2008)
FONs cash reserve will last another 2 and a half years (spring 2008) by which point Martin assumes to have gained positive cash flow
Advertisement is not planned to be rolled out and the marketing strategy will continue to be build upon word of mouth only
According to FONs own numbers, the current user base accounts for 95,000 foneros and 20,000 registered routers (hot spots)

He further stressed the point to see ISPs not to be competitors but rather thinks 3G providers would fall under this category.

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Mike vs. Martin: current FON war and new ideas October 3, 2006

There is a war going on, now you can't deny it anymore. Every new article about FON ends up in a discussion whether Martin (Varsavsky) is the good guy or Mike (Puchol), whether or not FONs figures on active routers and foneros is accurate. First of all some facts:

It has all started with Mikes in-depth analysis of FONs database feeding their maps. According to his findings only 3.674 routers have been online within the last hour (another 7.814 routers have been registered)
Martin left a comment stating that only the newer versions of the firmware could be tracked which leads to the assumption more routers are in fact online but can unfortunately not been tracked (and won't show up as dark-green spots on maps)

From there on it was basically all about mutual accusations not only between the two of them but also those who are either pro or contra FON (e.g. see here and here). Mike repeatedly noted he only comments on FON on his own blog or as a direct comment on Martin's but would not post on forums anymore as he might be biased being part of a new venture in a similar business (note: he is most likely involved in Wisher.com, together with Ferran Moreno of Air Bites, both ventures are obviously all about WiFi). I don't get the point why Mike is being accused working for an alleged competitor while he is very open about it. Of course, everyone needs to be aware of the fact that he might have interests in dissing FON but as long as he clearly disclaims it (which took him a while as you see here) I think this is ok. He has the right to comment on whatever he wants and as long as it is on his own blog I don't think it is unethical. The problem I see is, that it has nothing to do with FON and FON's potential anymore. Plus, you can't accuse Martin, the CEO of FON of not being pessimistic about it. Sure, he is as much biased as everyone who either has a strong commercial interest in FON or just believes this one will finally work after MyZones and Joltage have failed (to name only the ones discussed in the comments).

Even Air Bites, NYCwireless and Boingo hardly deliver any great customer experience. If you look at their maps and listings, Boingo returns 115 hotspots in New York City, NYCwireless 144 and Air Bites currently shows 8 active nodes in Madrid (one could interprete the latter as failed). Compared to ca. 50 active FON nodes in NYC (yes, I have counted only dark-green spots to make this as conservative as possible), FON might not appear as the big winner in this game just now but it's definitely no vaporware either. To be honest, neither of these services make really sense to use today. You are still better off just hoping to find an open (private) hotspot or using 3g. Add another 50 T-Mobile hotspots (mainly if not only at Starbucks in NYC) and sign-up for all services above gives you a total of 360 hotspots. And that is a real number now.

The question is will FON ever be what it claims to be or will any new WiFi network finally deliver ubiquitous WiFi at all? One main factor is where foneros put their router. In case of NY again, it wouldn't make much sense to put up a router anywhere but right at the window facing the street. This is hard to get control of. Maybe the new La Fonera should have had mashing functionality built in right at the start, like the Meraki Mini? Sure, this would have helped but obviously the current business and incentive model wouldn't work with meshing as you would need to distinct between those who share their broadband they are paying for and those who pass on WiFi using their node as a repeater. FONs approach in Europe where they give away routers to people that live right by busy places is going into the right direction, I think. The same applies to the East Village project in Manhattan which unfortunately has not reached the critical mass yet. But this is rather a matter of time and marketing/ PR money then the wrong strategy. I personally agree with critics that don't see where the 500k cash burn rate goes at the moment and I guess FON could probably do better here and there. But FON is far from having failed and given the time on the market/ real roll out ratio, FON probably is in better shape as it appears to many.