El Fon Blog

Fon has been keeping their mouths shut about a legal case in Germany (DE) that they lost LAST YEAR, when the courts ruled that Fon’s resale of Internet service constitutes a breach of DE fair business practice. They’ve also lost the appeal, and the ruling was declared “provisionally enforceable”. This means that Fon can’t charge money for their services throughout DE, even while a second appeal gets under way. Fon remains noncompliant at this time.

Fon CEO Martin Varsavsky issued an unconvincing statement downplaying the seriousness of the matter in his Spanish-only blog:

There are rumors that the FON network was outlawed in Germany. This is not true. We lost a lawsuit against a small operator who does not want its customers (to be) Foneros, but we are negotiating with them to (make them) realize that, like many other operators have realized, that Fon is a good business for them.

Martin still hasn’t gotten around to posting to his German-language blog audience!

Fon issued a similar statement (plus advertisement) for David Garcia (Fon Customer Service) to relay to those concerned within the English Fon Board:

We lost a trial for unfair competition with an ISP that their legal team dosn’t want that their customers share their internet connections, but besides appealing against this rule we’re also negotiating with them to make them realize that Fon is good for their business, as it has happened with other ISPs and mobile phone companies such as BT in UK, ZON in portugal, Comstar in Russia, E-plus in Germany, Neuf in France, etc.
Those companies know that Fon is their partner and it helps them to get a better appreciation from their customers, offering them not only internet at home but at hundreds of thousands of other places.
Also, let me reassure that this ruling only affects FON as a company and not to the Foneros, be them Linus, Bills or Aliens.

These reassurances are weak, as it has been clearly said the DE courts outlawed Fon’s business practice itself, not just within the scope of a single plaintiff.

The Timeline:

The court’s decision is that FON has to pay €200,000 due to the Security issues this causes, €25.000,00 for failure to comply by providing a list of Foneros which are customers of Plaintiff “1&1″. Due to losing the second trial, it seems these amounts are now increased to 110%. Upon FON’s second conviction, each breach requires payment of up to €250,000 - or six month’s imprisonment, and halt FON operations for that duration.

Fon proposes to Foneros and the Press, that it is appealing the second ruling, and at the same time, pursuing a “partnership” with the Plaintiff, “1&1″. It is not explained why they believe they will succeed now, when presumably, failure to “partner” resulted in the lawsuit in the first place. Nor is it clear how they can pursue an appeal without offending the Plaintiff at the same time.

What will happen to Foneros in DE, if Fon loses the right to operate there? At the least, there will be no more sales of passes to Aliens there. Free roaming will probably continue among Linuses and visiting Bills. However, a major component of the Fon System will be destroyed.

It is also unknown what effect this legal loss will have on Foneros in other countries, who may belong to ISPs which are also unwilling to passively participate. Can we depend on Fon to accurately turn Day Pass sales on and off at will, depending on the Fonero’s ISP? Will Fon update older La Fonera WiFi router’s firmwares to permit disabling sharing? - this is a feature now found in La Fonera 2.0. If Fon updates older firmware for that feature, will they consider including the software-based improvements which they have seen fit to provide only in newer hardware?

If Fon cannot resell Internet service in DE, what could they sell in that territory instead? Perhaps they will take my gift idea of using the routers to host VPN servers so they could sell privacy and security enhancement services? Foneros and Aliens worldwide would appreciate this as well!

Elfonblog thanks skynetbbs for providing translation of the lawsuit timeline.

If you’re a high speed Internet customer in the USA, particularly of Time Warner Cable, you can’t have missed the exploding controversy about their plans to impose bandwidth (download?) limits and charge customers who go over that limit.

Let’s just establish some facts here: bandwidth is not a product which is manufactured and consumed. It is 100% recyclable. No bits, bytes or gigabytes are being destroyed in the process of providing it to people. Bandwidth does not really cost ISPs anything to transmit beyond the cost of keeping the network equipment turned on and air conditioned! Bandwidth is merely the equivalent of a certain percentage of the network’s attention for a certain period of time. If everyone shut their cablemodems off at the same time for a day, TWC’s costs would drop only by an insignifigant percentage!

Another fact: there is no such thing as a “bandwidth hog”. Customers who download very little do NOT “subsidize” customers who download more. Bytes are not manufactured things which are consumed in the course of use. It is not ounces of fuel or kilowatts of electricity. Customers have contracts for “as high as (LOL)” speeds, and unlimited bandwidth over the course of the billing period. No one actually manages to acquire that much bandwidth, let alone exceed it! It’s true that the telcom monopolies have oversold their Internet service, but that is not the fault or problem of the customer. We’re not “hogs” just because we download and upload a statistically higher percentage than the grandma living next door!

There’s simply no other fair way to provide and bill Internet service other than by rate/sec over the billing period!

Another fact: a fully-utilized network costs only 7% more to maintain than an idle one, due to slightly higher cooling expenses, and long-term equipment wear.* THERE ARE NO BANDWIDTH SHORTAGES except where TWC and other monopolies are causing them as a pretense to raise prices and ration it!!

TWC would rather spend their magnificent profits on yachts for every day of the week than to upgrade their networks to meet their customer’s needs. They have no substantial competition! The bottom line is that in the short term, TWC is trying to kill video and voice services other than their own, by placing such an insultingly low threshold to start charging “overages”. In the long term, TWC is trying to link a fixed price to an irrelevant unit of measure, when the cost of providing the service is really dropping, even though technology makes much higher speeds possible.

If TWC imposes bandwidth caps of ANY KIND, I will abandon them immediately. If there are no alternatives, I will form a co-op with all of the neighbors on my block: those of us with Internet service will pool our connections together with the multi-WAN router I have sitting on this shelf here, and we’ll sell it to the rest of the neighbors and split the cost all around. A little bandwidth monitoring and management will ensure that we rarely go over our “limits” and if TWC feels “screwed” about this, then all I can say is that i’m not bringing any lube.

Customers of Time Warner Cable: please click the link below to join the online petition opposing their bandwidth caps:
Time Warner Cable Road Runner Bandwidth Cap

4/14 Addition: I am beginning to suspect that this is all another trick. Last year, ISP monopolies “gave in” to their customers who opposed packet filtering. And while people were still cheering, they blithely added “we’ll just throttle instead”. And isn’t that what they wanted to do all along, hmmmm? Now here we have what looks like a similar setup: absolutely ridiculously, insultingly low downloading caps that are guaranteed to raise a public outcry. Let us begin to anticipate what it is that TWC really wants, if it is not tiered downloading caps and Draconian overuse fees. Let us not be fooled again. TWC is probably following in some other telco’s footsteps here, and TWC’s experiment will serve as a testbed for every other greedy monopolistic ISP in the world, and believe me, the only kind of monopolistic ISP is a greedy one.

4/21 Addition: It seems that Time Warner is in tears, is taking it’s ball and going home. News is coming in that they’re not going to roll out DOCSIS 3, or offer higher speed connections. Sounds like punishment to me. TWC to Customers: You Don’t Want Tiers, You Don’t Get Super-fast Broadband

*I learned about this a couple of years ago, in an article which quoted a frank admission by a company president of a big backbone provider. I have been unable to find the URL, because the search terms “network neutrality” have too much noise to signal in a Google search. However, here is a new NYT article that makes the same point almost as well as the one I remember:
As Costs Fall, Companies Push to Raise Internet Price

It’s today. Let’s go see if Fon forgot again, like they did last year.

Reviews are coming in from Portland OR, USA about the quality of WiMax service launched there by Clearwire. Most of what I am reading sounds positive.

I mentioned Clearwire in my previous blog. They have been offering a sort of “pre-WiMax” wireless broadband service in major cities across the USA.

Clearwire and Sprint had intended to partner under the Xohm name, and roll out WiMax throughout the USA. Austin, TX had been one of those target cities, and I was very excited! To make a long blog short, Sprint is not doing so well, and the partnership dissolved, leaving Clearwire to attempt a more limited roll-out on their own.

Here is their handy little WiMax/WiFi router. This device marries a WiMax modem in an USB dongle with a small WiFi router equipped with an USB port. Doesn’t that sound familiar?

It’s dissapointing that Fon’s Fonosferat Program has avoided thinking of La Fonera 2.0’s USB port as a WAN interface. With WiMax and WiBro dongles available for a year already, Fon could have achieved the WiMax-Fon router by now. Perhaps they are still looking for a way to deliver Fon CEO Martin Varsavsky’s vision of *providing* WiMax service via a Fon device which is tethered as usual to DSL or cablemodem?