Shame they’re a bunch of morons – they told me taking pictures of their restaurant from the street was illegal (!?). If someone came and took a picture of an ad I plastered on my wall…I’d be more happy than anything, it would mean people notice it (even if it was a competitor). Anyway, if you come to Barcelona, check out Fresh&Ready, not for the food, but for the free WiFi.

A blogger who signs up will receive $5 per 1.000 impressions, and $25 for each employee referral. In theory, only good quality jobs are posted through this network. This is not exactly like paying bloggers to write product reviews, which stirred a good deal of controversy, but what would happen if a blogger writes bad about a company or product whose job offer is appearing right above the post?

On a first look, the maps look really nice – they use Google Maps, by default in the mixed view, where you see a satellite image and an overlay of roads and placemarks. I will not bore you with the details, as it is better that you check them out yourself and make up your mind.

This post is not intended as a review of the service itself, but rather, a revelation of the real figures behind FON’s network – peeking under the layer of PR and flamboyance. Martin Varsavsky is always boasting about FON being the largest WiFi community of the world – in my view, this is not accurate.
During months, FON has been claiming to be a “movement”, with a marked communist image behind (the marching workers, the spray-painted logos, etc.). This movement was supposed to kill mobile operators, who currently oppress people with their sky-high tariffs. We could go into a long debate just on this topic, but lets move on. During all this time, FON has suffered untold problems with staffing, PR mini-scandals, shipping broken routers or taking weeks and months to even send them out, not replying to repeated requests to support@fon.com, and blatantly ignoring the public forums, where the community behind the movement was expressing its increasing anger and frustration.

The blinding truth – less than 3.700 routers online worldwide

Digging a bit deeper into the workings behind the maps, I have found that there is a method to run a query to retrieve all the hotspots in FON’s database, not just two hundred, or those in a particular region. If you want to see an example, click here. This is a query that will return all hotspots on the planet that have been FONing home during the last hour. It can take a little while to load, so be patient. Until a couple of days ago, results were returned in XML format, which has been dropped in favor of the new plain, comma-delimited format.

I predict that FON will not like the above link, and thus will try to either change the format of the php call, or add artificial records to confuse the application I have written to process the data. First, I wrote a simple application using RealBasic (having been a long-time Visual Basic acolyte, it is a welcome change, allowing me to code under Mac and Windows transparently) – source code here. A screenshot of a full run is shown below.

Just from the details shown after the run, a few enlightening facts surface:

• The highest user ID found is 92.192, but the total amount of processed records is only 55.384. I have to investigate a bit further, but it appears that in some cases, a record is stored twice, once holding the user type (Linus, Alien or Bill), and again holding the router mode (online or unknown). This is the reason why some people see both the orange dot and the green halo on their locations at maps.fon.com, and also the reason why at this time I cannot confirm that the real number of Foneros is 43.896.
• There are only 3.674 routers online on the entire planet. So much for the largest WiFi community in the world. The other 7.814 are registered routers, from which nothing has been heard during the last hour. These figures have been checked a few times during the last few days, and they stay more or less constant.
• Out of the entire user base, only 1.317 have become Bills. So much for milking one’s WiFi.
• The highest router ID found in the results was 19.889, so if we add offline and online routers (best case scenario), then around 8.401 routers have never been registered, representing 42.2% of sold routers. Extrapolating this to the 1 million routers Martin wants to sell would results in a loss of $10.55 million!.

Looking at the per-country statistics (per-city could be made, given some extra time and coding), some curious details also stand out:

• There are two registered routers in Afghanistan – but neither is online. Not surprising, considering the amount of explosives that have been dropped on the place.
• China and Taiwan have 9 routers registered, but none online. Martin was blogging about his expansion into Asia, which looks rather bleak right now. 165 Foneros are registered however.
• Germany and Spain have around the same number of registered routers, although Germany almost doubles Spain in the number of online routers.
• The United States ranks third in number of registered and online routers, however, it holds the highest number of Bills (408). The next is Germany, with 237.

Finally, we can derive a few figures from these numbers. These are highly interpreted, and must be taken as theoretical extremes.

• If FON sold one $3 one-day pass every day of the year on each of the online routers, it would make a gross income of $4 million. This is before tax and the Bill’s share where applicable. You at the back, stop giggling!
• Making a wild assumption that each router’s signal reaches 100 people, FON would only cover 0.11% of Germany’s population of 82 million.
• Boingo gives you access to 45.000 hotspots. FON has about 8% of that figure, and with location quality debatable – it is a fact most FON hotspots will not be optimized for even street-level coverage.

I believe it is time for FON to stop boasting about having the largest WiFi community in the world, and start concentrating on its real problems. And if they still don’t know what these are, they have a nice summary at the online forums. Besides, for spending 500.000 Euros per month, this is a pretty poor show, in my humble opinion.

The patents date back to 1998 and 2001, and I remember vividly using IRC during my university years (it was born late August 1988), and mailing lists even before that. Heck, remember BBSs over 1200bps modems? Well, these people at PalTalk seem to have patented just that. IRC and mailing lists. And by default, all other chat platforms that have come ever since – MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, Google, to name a few big ones, but miriads of smaller, targeted server-based chat mechanisms. Voice you say? I was using voice to talk to simulated ATC (yes, people actually acting as ‘virtual’ air traffic controlers, way cool!) while flying on a simulated airline in Microsoft Flight Simulator eons ago, when 800×600 was a decent resolution to run your games at.

Can anyone say ‘prior art’ and ‘patent trolls’? Further info on BusinessWire’s PalTalk press release.

How can they honestly ask Windows users to switch, when extremely basic features that have been in Windows at least since 95 (I believe in 3.1 too, but cannot confirm this) are simply not there. In this thread at macrumors.com some explanations are “this is not present in order to prevent lost files”, and “what if you forget to paste?  the file is gone” – if this had ever been a problem in Windows, do you think it would not have been fixed? In Windows, if you “forget” to paste a file you have cut, it is never deleted. It never goes to the trash without passing Go and collecting $100. It just sits there, until the OS decides you have indeed forgotten to paste it.

Whatever you do next, Steve, get yourself a copy of Windows XP and copy all the features people find normal, before you ask them to switch. Oh, and I still love the Mac.

What do you do when you need to embed WiFi into a project really quick? You look for OEM modules – one of the best manufacturers being Digi. They make, amongst other variations, the Wi-ME, a small box that has a RTOS chip (it can be made to run Linux apparently) and the WiFi adapter, with a serial interface and GPIOs that go to your application. In essence, you can bridge a serial port to a TCP or UDP port and stream data to the internet, all without messy wires!

After looking at the ordering page, I duly contacted the spanish distributor Matrix. I needed two modules by this last Monday, and so I requested to have the devices shipped by Friday last week. It all turned out into one big mess, with vague excuses about not being able to ship due to warehouse problems, or that the proforma could not be generated – and so I could not pay, and they could not ship…to cut a long story short, I got the units on Tuesday.

It usually is not a problem to have a shipping delay, but in this case, I arranged a meeting with the mechanical engineers working on the project, in order for them to see the device and fit it into the 3D plastics project. They actually measure the parts, as they say working from datasheets can usually spell trouble, so ideally they would take them away after the meeting. Had Matrix simply said “we cannot send it until Monday”, I would have arranged the meeting on Wednesday – no worries. But, as it frequently happens, they wanted to look good, without having the solid ground under their feet to do so.

When a company makes a commitment, whatever it may be, it has to stick to it. And when the costumer calls, obviously pissed off at the poor performance and the mount of problems he has landed on, you have to be hellbent on fixing the situation. If the person answering the phone cannot handle the situation, he/she must be trained to transfer the call to someone who can.

What did I do? I emailed the CEO, Joseph Dunsmore. His email address is not published on Digi’s site, but if you look on the Management Team page, and scroll down a bit, Jan McBride’s email is displayed. It was a case of formatting Joseph’s name in the same manner as Jan’s email, send the diatribe, and wait. The next day, I got a reply from Joseph, telling me he would follow up the case with Digi’s Managing Director in Europe. Not three hours had passed, and I got a call from Digi’s top man in Spain, who was very supportive and understanding. By this time, I had been so smoothed over, that I really didn’t want to complain anymore! The conversation ended up very well, with Digi offering their full support on our development, and a visit arranged sometime next week.

Would I recommend Digi to anyone deciding about whether to use their products? Absolutely!

Let’s get the first part over with. Just before the crash, I woke up the Mac from suspended animation, and surprisingly, the battery monitor reported 158:34 hours of battery life remaining…whoa! Lets assume the average battery life of 3 hours corresponds to a battery capacity of 4Ah (Ampere-hours) – then my Mac carries a 118Ah battery. For reference, your run-of-the-mill car battery has around 70Ah. Go figure.

The second time miss-calculation happened when I extracted an archive with StuffIt, which told me I had over 300 hours to wait…when the file size was only 2MB. I will try to take screenshots next time. It is obvious that these are dumb figures, but one has to wonder why there isn’t a top limit on the values, mainly so that it doesn’t look ridiculous.

Now, for the fuming rant. I am heading back home on the bus, and to kill time, I decided to write this post. To connect to the internet while on the move, I use a Nokia N70 over Bluetooth, which gives me 3G speed (you at the back, stop giggling!). Suddenly, and before I had time to click ‘Save and Continue Editing’ for the first time, the connection froze. I tried to disconnect, and Internet Connect remained stuck on “Disconnecting…”. There was no way to get it to actually finish the disconnection process…then I noticed the N70 was actually frozen too! Cursing my luck, I removed the battery from the phone, switched Bluetooth off on the Mac, tried to kill Internet Connect using the terminal…nothing. Whether the Mac froze the N70 or the other way around is unknown, but it is clear that both have a serious flaw for this to happen.

Shutdown time. I copy-pasted the text I had written into TextEdit, and saved it to the desktop. Then, without closing TextEdit, I tried to restart the Mac, but it was having none of it. As a last attempt, I held the power button down for five seconds, and finally, it shut down. The surprise came after restarting – the text file was gone from the desktop, and with it my half-written post. There was no trace of it anywhere, neither in Finder’s nor in TextEdit’s recent file list…Is this a serious problem?

I admit that so far, the Mac has proven very stable, with very few problems, and minor ones at that. But if it is possible to have incidents like the one I experienced, then the message about how Macs are un-crashable is simply not true. I know that Robert Scoble had a similar problem with a machine just like mine, his post relating to Dave Winer’s crash report. In my case, the damage wasn’t that great, but imagine this happening towards the end of a long process, like encoding a long video edit. Mac accolites will surely say “But Windows crashes too!”. I’d answer “But Microsoft doesn’t go around publishing agressive campaigns saying how Windows PCs are rock-solid in comparison with the monkey-on-acid-squeek-of-death”.

I love my Mac. But I disagree with the hype.

• The most important reason is that I have taken a position at a company that makes it unethical for me to continue participating in FON. I will no longer post on their forums; however, I will continue to post my thoughts about FON on my blog, and replying to Martin Varsavsky in his blog when I see it appropriate.
• FON has been a downhill experience from day one. I ordered my “social” router, and got charged by PayPal, but no confirmation from the company, no tracking number, nothing. I emailed their support address, no reply. It eventually arrived, admitedly faster than the month or two some people were reporting on the forums. After a few futile attempts at configuring the router to work with my DSL line, and a couple of completely ignored emails to FON support, I simply gave up. The router is now waiting for a PCB to turn it into a WaRThog.
• Every time I see a new crazy idea in Martin’s blog I feel more depressed about the FON project – does he really think WiFi is the way for homeless people to make a living, reselling VoIP services over Bluetooth? (don’t ask!). Where would he send them the money? Then there are the times when he takes a product and claims it was designed by FON, sometimes in secret collaboration with his backers Skype or Google. The latest is the Skype-compatible WiFi phone made by an Accton subsidiary – this is a design that Accton started way before FON even saw it, and way before Martin could have his logos photoshopped onto the mockups. As a matter of fact, out of the box this phone will not work at FON hostspots, as it lacks the browser required to perform user login – so they will have to work some magic.
• The english and spanish forums are another source of disappointment, with daily posts from people complaining about the extremely poor support that FON is providing them. Some have even taken to posting comments on Martin’s blog to air their issues, something blogtiquette considers a no-no. I posted a few days ago about this particular issue.
• They have followed an ill-conceived path to gaining publicity through bloggers, resulting in serious backslash from the spanish blogosphere (see here and here). Martin seems to think that by surrounding himself with top bloggers in exchange for dubious stock options or a seat in the board will get him a free ticket to stardom.
• I believe that FON serves two purposes – one is to give a personal vehicle of shininess to Martin’s ego. See this post by Glenn Fleishman on FON’s crazy deal announcements, later called off as a lie by Speakeasy – typical example of how he manipulates a phone conversation into front-line news. Om Malik also reported on this particular issue. Martin is someone who cannot be seen as co-founding anything, but as a leader and innovator.
  Secondly, FON serves as an experiment for Skype and Google, who somehow convinced Index and Sequoia to go along. I don’t believe the two VC firms are into experiments, but FON would certainly provide good feedback to S & G about socializing WiFi, hardware distribution, and the adoption of the Bill model as a viable way to extend a WiFi network. Other stuff such as amount of logins at each location/router, number of registered users, daily passes sold, etc. would make nice colored graphs in the resulting corporate presentation.
  But, the problem is that FON is a huge fiasco in terms of hardware distribution, firmware development, public relations, and costumer support. I thus question the validity of any figures that come out of this rather expensive experiment.
• Their firmware development process seems to be a closely guarded secret – but not for the same reasons Apple safeguards its own developments. FON started working with Brainslayer, the creator of DD-WRT, a free Linux distribution for Linksys (and other) routers. Apparently, Brainslayer was not very well treated by FON, and he parted to work in the Sputnik project, amongst other developments.
• Just as Mark Evans did, I have voiced my concerns about FON’s business model and strategy – now that they finally launched the Bills, it looks more ill-fated than ever.

I find it really amazing how FON, with the $21.7 million they got in funding, cannot manage to hire a competent team of support personnel, outsource their obviously ill router redistribution system, and get some muscle behind the community effort. Martin Varsavsky is known in Spain for starting companies, pumping them up, and selling at the best possible gain – then leaving them behind with serious problems. Just look at what people think of Jazztel, or what troubles the Ya.com portal went through.

For me, the FON adventure is over, and a new, better adventure is starting. We will start disclosing things around the end of August, so if you want to stay updated, you are welcome to subscribe to the RSS feed.

After plugging in the WRT54GS router as briefly described in the brief manual supplied with it (a third of one side of an A4 sheet of paper), I connect to the FON_HotSpot SSID detected by the MacBook. Fire up Firefox, and I’m promptly greeted with a welcome page that states the router could not configure itself, and thus has no connection to the Internet. It shows a few scenarios that one can check for problems, also suggesting one should consult again the third-of-a-page-handbook, and, failing all this, to try manual configuration of the router.

After about an hour of changing IP addresses of the WAN and LAN interfaces (and where is the WiFi interface? or is it linked to the LAN or WAN?), I have finally given up again. I’m not a networking überguru, but I know a bit about routing and setting up IP interfaces, and this thing just managed to get on my nerves. You cannot find a clear manual with diagrams of network connectivity, setups and scenarios, a description of the theory of operation of the hotspot, and as it has been shown, sending emails to FON support is usually futile. The forums are more helpful, but not because there is a healthy bunch of FON staff there, but because a number of talented and skilled individuals have taken upon themselves the task of helping others through the ordeal.

I’m sure that a lot, if not most, users that plug in the FON router can simply connect to it, register and start surfing, but in cases like mine, where I simply have a DSL router to which I plug in the FON router and it’s supposed to work – but doesn’t – a blank void is all there is left to stare at.

Maybe a last attempt will be to flash the new release of the firmware, once they have fixed the problems in v.0.6.6…

Bottom line is that FON cannot expect to create a WiFi planet with people roaming for free on the 1 million routers they are going to distribute, once they get their logistics right, based on complex hardware that requires from either skilled operators, or very good tech support and clear setup and troubleshooting guides. A couple of days ago, someone posted on the forum that FON was a beta company. How can a company class itself in beta? It can have a service in beta, but the company must be running, if not totally smooth, at least with agility and responsiveness, fixing its problems quickly and providing first-class customer service.