El Fon Blog

Yes, it’s been 4 years now since Fon launched. Like its 3rd birthday, Fon has forgotten it!

The Fonero Community, twice reborn, is MIA again.

Promises, promises, so many promises. So many broken promises. So much wasted time and money.

Now, Fon CEO Martin Varsavsky has made the incredulous claim that someone ordered 400,000 Fon routers of some sort. What model, why they had to come from Fon, who only rebadges routers, and who the buyer may be is unknown. But there are enough blanks in Martin’s announcement, that this could mean almost anything. My best-case scenario is that Fon has arranged to supply a coupon-code for a Fonera, to purchasers of the Android phone or even that disappointing abortion known as the Ipad. Get ready, my friends, to give free wifi to all these new folks, who have also paid Fon up front, and funded their network deployment.

Imagine my shock, that none of the news and tech blogs I follow have mentioned this, Fon’s latest crackpot tease. Considering all of the times before that Fon’s press releases have turned out to be polished puckey, any further attention could result in total collapse of Fon’s credibility. Ask anyone on the street; “do you know what Fawn Wifi is?”, and they’ll likely shrug and turn away.

I watched the 1954 and 1999 versions of George Orwell’s Animal Farm last weekend. I suppose that story could represent any number of present-day associations, and it fits Fon well too. Playing to emotions, while concealing the facts. Ever-moving goalposts. Quiet political purges; assassinations. Blatant editing of history. Treating the membership as chattel, while hiding behind masks of fellowship. Faustian bargains with third parties, without the membership’s consent nor desire. The Spanish are indeed familiar with fascism. Should I be surprised?

Foneros, if you are still out there, please comment below. Tell me what you plan to do with Fon this year.

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?

Note: I meant to post this over the weekend, but I had to wait for issues with my bloghost to clear up.

After three years of intense demand, Fon CEO Martin Varsavsky is featuring a no-promises, not-in-production weatherized Fonera in his blog. This is perhaps out of envy for Meraki’s recent publicity for their tiny meshing APs and rugged solar-powered routers.

Here is Fon’s current concept of an outdoor wifi appliance:

[Click Us]

This device does not currently have an official name, but I like to call it “Fonera FonPod”. Isn’t that catchy?

I’m not wild about the design of this enclosure as presented. It’s a flattened box, about 50% larger than La Fonera 2. It seems large enough to house a flat-panel antenna, but that does not appear to be what Fon has in mind. The box splits vertically into front and back halves, and is held together with 10 visible screws. The front would appear to be white plastic with a honeycomb pattern which we have never seen associated with Fon until now. It’s probably another company’s production model with a “Fon” sticker pasted to the front.

The top of the case has an antenna jack, and the bottom appears to have a compression port for admitting cables through an airtight seal. This would make FonPod the first Fonera which has the antenna opposite the cables. All previous models have had jacks and antennas together along the rear, making installation anywhere but a table or shelf awkward. Suprisingly, the rear of the enclosure appears to have three additional connections for WAN, LAN(!) and Power. These connections don’t appear to be weather-resistant, and if these are on the rear, the bottom connection becomes a mystery.

The appearance of LAN suggests that the Fonera inside is based on the Plus or 2.0 models. While a LAN jack would seem pointless for a device that will be installed in remote places, it might be useful for passing an Ethernet connection through to additional equipment, like another AP or a networked security camera. Availability of a USB jack would be useful for similar reasons, and probably enable the use of much cheaper hardware. I’ve been advocating the marketing of Fon routers to metro wifi and building managements for this reason. A simple instrument package could be plugged into such extra ports to provide traffic cams, triangulate gunshots and report weather and smog conditions. That added value could make Fon more attractive than Meraki for some large and wealthy markets.

Bear in mind that the device Fon proposes is still a router, not an access point. This is sort of overkill for the kind of work it will be doing. Let us pray that the LAN port is finally bridged, instead of senselessly NAT’ted. Fon would benefeit by outgrowing their tendancy to repurpose existing products by merely rewrapping them.

[Click Me]

The back of the case has some exposed mounting studs, apparently used to attach the hardware within, and the backplate dips up and down along the seam where other screws ring the perimeter. It would seem that the halves are clamped around a very large, vertically aligned gasket, and the plastic half is rather soft. Those screws are going to rust very quickly, and that sort of gasket is just not practical for long, leakproof life. There appears to be some mounting hardware inside the shipping box, but it is hard to tell whether FonPod must be attached to a pipe, a flat surface, or either. Since there is a (?)7dbi omnidirectional dipole antenna included, this mounting hardware probably does not provide pivoting azimuth for pointing a directional antenna.

I’d like to take a crack at designing a better enclosure, so here are some of my thoughts. For some of my inspiration, see the below photos of an actual ClearWire wireless broadband device deployed in markets like nearby Corpus Christi TX. Only twice the size of La Fonera 2, it is based on technology similar to WiMax, which will soon replace it. This particular device isn’t for outdoors, but rather sits vertically on a desk or shelf with one side facing the ClearWire tower. It integrates a large flatpanel antenna with a network device in the same package, and the case is basically a deep sleeve into which the electronics slide from below. If it was possible to seal this and make all connections through the bottom, it would make a decent outdoor enclosure.

[Click Us]

My concept of Fonera FonPod is an enclosure designed to resemble a 2x scale La Fonera Plus. It has an internal flatpanel antenna like Fontenna, and ships with Power over Ethernet (PoE) adapters. The mounting bracket should permit installation upon either vertical wall or pole, and feature adjustable angle of elevation. The case should be manufactured as a seamless PVC shell with the bottom having the only opening, through a recessed partition.

The partition would have a fitting to allow passage of 1-2 cables through a seal. The partition would have a gasket around it’s perimeter, and would have a framework mounted to it’s inner side. All internal components would be mounted to that framework so that they all slide in and out as though in a drawer.

[Click Us]

A standard La Fonera 1/+/2 would simply be inserted inside and attached to internal cables.

An optional kit would consist of a holder for a dozen or so standard rechargeable batteries, and include a simple voltage regulator, so that Fonera FonPod might be powered by sun or wind.

FonPod II, which might be a WiMax FonPod, would look nearly identical, but the flat panel antenna would be aimed at the WiMax base station and there would be a dipole wifi antenna pointing down from the bottom, or there could be a second flat panel antenna connected with a cable.

So, what do you folks think? Add your comments below, and feel welcome to include links to pics or diagrams of your own.