fontastic.org - FON and free WiFi blog

FON needs beta testers June 4, 2007

FON is adding on more web applications and is asking you, the FON community to apply to the beta tester program. You need to

be over 18 years old
be an English speaker (communication related to this program will be sent in English only)
have a registered FON user name that has been active for over 6 months
have a La Fonera installed and registered for over 4 months
live in one of the following countries:Germany, Austria, Bulgaria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Estonia, Finland, France, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, Malta, Norway, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, United Kingdom, Czech Republic, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, Canada, USA, Hong Kong, Korea, Taiwan, Japan

Send an email to beta@fon.com until June 10th and you will receive notification whether you have been chosen shortly.

Google invests in Meraki’s mesh technology

Is FON your favorite webware? May 24, 2007

You can vote for FON to become your favorite webware. Fon has been chosen to be amongst the top 100 Webware finalists on Webware.com, an initiative by CNET. There are 10 categories with 25 candidates each, 10 of which will be choosen by you - the audience. You can vote for FON here.

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FON Downloader next in pipeline June 13, 2006

Ok, the new Fonera router is on it's way and about 20.000 units should hit the market in September. The router is manufactured by China-based Accton and features the latest Fon software incl. double SSID (Fon & personal) amongst other. But Martin Varsavsky has the next revolution on his shortlist already. The next generation or upscale Fonera router will feature more build in memory to run Linux-based "downloading" software such as Limewire or Azureus enabling the router to download music, movies and other media without being connected to a computer. You can also upload your own portal to the router. Now, when you log on to it (or your friends, family and other foneros) one will have a customized portal (even access controlled areas should be possible). You could "tell" your Fonera Downloader from a remote place to get you a movie you want, say while you have limited bandwidth connection to the internet and then stream it from there when you reach a WiFi AP. Or you just connect an external hard-drive to the router, store all your music there and you could access your archive anywhere in the world. This sounds really great! Web 2.0 that makes sense and offers a real value for a change.

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FON: the future of the business model May 25, 2006

The FON movement has converted 39.000 people into foneros so far. One day, it might be as much as 1 million forming a real ubiquitous WiFi network. Linuses and Aliens will be able to roam in larger cities and at points of interest worldwide. We foneros appreciate such a scenario very much but let's not forget that Fon is not only a movement, it's a business, too. Now, let's do the maths and see where the business model could be in:

1. Hardware

Today the only hardware business lies in the sales of the Linksys router which clearly is not making any money, in fact Martin Varsavsky claims FON looses $25 per unit. With their own router (coming shortly) they will probably make a margin which I assume should be at least around 20% of sales in the long run (direct to consumer model and learning curve effect provided). Let's simplify and only note down the best case scenario: 1.000.000 x $25 x 20% = $5.000.000 gross margin. Good, but not good enough I guess given the VC put into FON (+ $20 Mil).

2. Basic Service

The most obvious source of income is the revenues generated thru Aliens. As it is pretty easy to avoid monthly charges for heavy users by simply purchasing a router (less than 1 month of service) and become a Linus, the Aliens model is only interesting for those who do not have broadband at home and travel a lot. T-Mobile has had 450.000 log-ins per quarter with 4.500 hotspots. That's 400 log-ins per hotspot and year but obviously these hotspot are only located at places with enough traffic. However, in a scenario of 1 Million hotspots one could assume there are at least 5% that can attract enough Aliens to generate revenues. I know, this is going to be a Web 1.0 business plan calculation but let's play: 1.000.000 x 5% = 50.000 hotspots. We said, there are Linuses and Aliens using the hotspot i.e. not everyone is paying. Let's say there are 25% Aliens using these high-traffic hotspots (in total there might be fewer aliens of course). Then: 50.000 hsp x 400 log-ins = 20 Mill. x 25% x $2 (min. charge) = $10.000.000 gross margin. Not bad as this is per year.

3. Value Added Services

Once you built a network like this and everyone is online wirelessly anytime and anyplace, demands for services even increases. Because all foneros log-on via a hotspot everyone will need to pass the log-in portal which is thus an ideal marketplace for added value services. Cheap Voice-over-IP calls could be another source of income and actually also be convenient for foneros if offered thru FON as they don't need to sign-up to another service. A French WiFi company in Marseilles is doing exactly this and charges €5 per month for unlimited calls. To calculate the revenues from value added services is really getting difficult but just for fun, let's assume this: only 1% are using value added services at, say $5 per month and you have 100.000 x $5 x 12 months = $6.000.000 per year.

The key of success is of course, to create a really large user base. This is true for almost every Web 2.0 company but is even more important in this case as the attraction and the beauty of FON lies in the ubiquitous network. In other words, a sporadic accumulation of access points won't work on the long run, a close meshed network, however, will be both a great user experience for many and a great success for FON.

DISCLAIMER: the above calculation is fictitious and describes a scenario I would call "best case".

We are really proud to announce our new service: we want to invite everyone to sign-up with us for your free blog! Yes, that's right, you will get your own blog, your own choice of Wordpress themes and a nice, personalized URL (http://yourname.fontastic.org). We want to give everyone the opportunity to blog about FON and the free WiFi movement so feel free to spread the word. We will add more and more features to the community (e.g. we are currently working on a single RSS feed for all fontastic blogs). Speaking about features for the FON community, we also added our FONtastic board for any help you might seek. The main purpose is to support our free blogs but feel free to use it for any discussion you think is interesting and related to FON and WiFi.

YouTube vs. Blip.tv March 31, 2006

A bit off topic, but might be interesting anyways. I am into videoblogging lately and generally we want to visualize more thru video than images here on fontastic.org. That's why I uploaded the 2 short videos seen in one of my last posts. As I am a big fan of blip.tv I used their platform which I think is really great. So far I had only used it with vlogs made on a Mac (iMovie) and this worked fine. The short .avi clips of the Fon box, though, did not work well on blip.tv. As a backup I also use to try YouTube and this worked just fine. Now you find the updated post below and the links should work. The overall quality of YouTube is not as good as blip.tv but at least for .avi files I would recommend YouTube for the time being.