Martin’s blog post is an absolute HOOT to read. The angry, cheated Fonero Community descended upon him, demanding action, and his response was to literally cry and attempt to make Foneros feel guilty that his skeleton staff is overworked. Sorry big boy, the burden of guilt is entirely upon you there!

Martin clearly regards EVERY critic as “a troll” and proposes that Fon is somehow entitled to more compliments. I think it’s clear that he has an idyllic image that he refuses to let go of, and he will not listen to reason and see Fon for what it has become to those of us who actually comprise the Fon Network. This reminds me of the attitude of Fon’s Board moderators, who actually warn people to stop complaining until some more compliments pile up to offset them. Martin lives in such a bubble! He thinks he can manage Fon’s image by simple decree. But he’s just painting posies over his own windows.

Random things we learned about Fon this time:

IMHO, Fon is really stepping backwards to “simpler” routers because Fon has discovered the hard way that they don’t have the brand recognition to unload more expensive gadgets like La Fonera 2.0n. People are more likely to buy a cheapo router from an unknown company (like Fon), than a fancy expensive router. Problem is, this new one is still about $20 too much. Fon has also realized that it can’t construct nor maintain complex firmware, but they’re not going to admit that either.

Fon SIMPL’s sticker model number is 2305E. I expect it’s a re-badge of some other brand, as always. Perhaps in a few months, we’ll find manufacturer’s firmware to slap on this puppy. Check out Steven’s gallery of external photos here.

Anyone going to this “Mobile World Congress” can find more information about the Con, as well as some incorrect information about Fon here. Despite what it says there, Fon didn’t start the wifi revolution, Fon didn’t start with the Fonera wifi router, and Fon didn’t sell La Fonera when it launched in 2006. La Fonera 2.0n is not the most innovative; it’s a poor, faulty copy of routers many others have been selling for a couple of years, Fon is not the largest wifi community, but it contributes slightly to larger “partners” which make a considerable aggregate network. The numbers given about “members” and “hotspots” are blatent lies. Also, Fon forgot to mention one of their partners, McAfee, by which Fon is Safe!

UPDATE: In addition to Martin’s silly comments, see his silly new post in response to the complaints: Fonera 2.0n Quality Survey

*UPDATE2 to bullet point 3 above: According to FrancoFON’s database of the Northern Hemisphere on Feb 17 2010, there are a total of 691,000 active Fon hotspots including partners BT(364k), Neuf(82k) and Livedoor(176k) and 68,000 active La Fonera routers. They find 141,000 inactive La Foneras. A bit of quick research adds Fon partners ZON in Portugal - 100k circa 2/2010, Comstar in Russia - 2,000 circa 12/2009 and E-Plus in Germany for up to 25k circa 6/2009. That leaves 200k hotspots missing, unless we count Fon’s inactive routers, leaving us only 40k short. I know of no way to find out which partner hotspots are also inactive, but it becomes clear that Martin’s “over a million” statement is broad exaggeration. Fon’s contribution comes in at 5th (of 7) place (or 3rd if you unfairly count dead hotspots).

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Consider that Martin stated on Feb 3, 2010 that “It took Fon almost four years to sell half a million WiFi routers known as Foneras.” Since all live, plus dead Foneras only total 209k, this means that 291k Foneras were allegedly sold, but were never registered to Fon!

This picture gets far grimmer if you add “half a million sold” to an additional “€15 million worth” of routers which Fon gave away. Fon sold La Fonera v1 routers for as little as $1, but in my mind, Martin would cleverly count that as “sold” and not free.** Only v1 routers were given away. Martin claimed that v1 was sold at practically cost, so at regular price of €29, that means an additional 500k routers were given away, an oddly convenient number. So if Fon has indeed *distributed* a full million routers now, only 209k were ever registered (21%, or 1-in-5) and only 68k remain live (or 3-in-10 of every router registered), which is about 7%, or 1-in-14 of all Foneras ever distributed!

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**It’s also possible that Martin is adding the same numbers into two columns again. He might count the “discounted” routers as both fully “sold”, and also a “fraction” of a free router by attributing part of that €15M to offset the amount of the discount. Warranty replacements probably also get relabeled as “given away” too; they additionally count as increments to Fon’s hotspot network (one dead router + one replacement = two purportedly available hotspots). Frankly, i’m weary of peeking down all the possible rabbit-holes. In this article i’m pretending that Martin’s statements are legitimate. If he’s outsmarted himself with statistical sleight of hand, and made Fon look bad, that’s his fault.

UPDATE3: Martin’s still at it. In his Spanish-only blog now, he whines about how English people are rude, and expresses that he thinks he’s entitled to praise for his “incredible work”, never mind the results. Again, he suggests that his poor staff’s feelings are hurt by any critical feedback (I wonder if this means Iurgi has been threatening to quit? Oh boy!), blind to the fact that the comments were clearly directed just at him. He again unambiguously admits that support for La Fonera 2.0g is terminated. That model was sold as beta for 6 months starting in Oct 2008, sold as “public ready” in April 2009, and the last firmware for it was issued Oct/Nov 2009. This suggests that Martin considers his company’s obligation finished after only about a year.

UPDATE4: A week later, Engadget finally posts their benign and obligatory article about SIMPL. Please visit there and ADD YOUR COMMENTS! Also, visit the online petition to Fon here.

In the event Martin’s blog posts get removed or censored, please check back here for my snapshots.

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 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.

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

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?

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.

Stage 1) Distribute free Fon hotspot-for-VOIP-handset software, and build a community of volunteers who will run it on dedicated PCs, so that the public can save money on voice calls wherever such a (ad-hoc) Fon hotspot can be found. These are comparable to today’s femtocells, only they use wifi instead of rebroadcasting cellular frequencies, and are comparable to Fon’s experimental “FonSpot” software which is based on Linux. Fon to openly challenge monopolistic telco companies by selling cheaper services. Fon to profit by reselling Internet bandwidth donated by the volunteers.

Stage 2) Stage 1 plan fails to attract enough press or jump certain legal obstacles. Fon disavows it’s original plans, and remarkets the company as a community of volunteers who run Fon hotspots for PCs, with emphasis on the fairly obligatory “free roaming” feature offered to members. Changes the pronunciation of the company from “phone” to “fawn” and claim that they are named after the North African Fon Ethnic tribe. Ad-hoc-wifi PC software is dropped, and Fon is retooled as router firmware for popular wifi routers. Distribute free router firmware, and sell a supply of Linksys routers pre-flashed to get things moving. Official Launch of Fon as a Revolution, a Network, and a Community. The populist, community friendly facade permits Fon to attract fans and gloss over shortcomings in their membership terms and business plan. Most adoption takes place among techie hobbyists. The Press applauds.

Stage 3) Stage 2 plan fails to establish sustainable market for wifi sales, and Fon never explores whether it is their terms, their price point, or their chosen market which is at fault. Linksys routers ran out of stock. Product partnerships failed due to Fon’s exaggerated promises, creative alternate definitions and numerous unmentioned conditions. Member churn is high, because the Fon program does not keep their interest* long enough, and the routers are very easy to improve with better firmware (designed by an disgruntled ex-Fon developer). Fon invests literally no resources on the “revolution” or “community” aspects of their network, unless it makes a good soundbyte for the press. After an extended period of inactivity, during which the Fonero Community nearly completely dies away, Fon begins replacing the old open-source routers with a proprietary one. In key areas, a supply of those routers is given away or sold at cost, to encourage rapid growth of the Network. Most adoption now takes place among newbies, people who need a cheap wifi solution but did not read the fine print, and others who are far less likely to be dedicated to something because they weren’t asked to really invest in it. The Press applauds loudly. Fon now to profit from router sales, and by inflating the value of the company for eventual resale.

Stage 4) Stage 3 plan fails to generate sufficient nor permanent network growth. Proprietary routers prove to be hackable, but most owners simply discard them now when they lose interest*. Fonero Community, which Fon has failed to establish a relationship with, and has little influence over, is reaching out to The Press independantly. Foneros have studied and analyzed Fon’s TOS now, and are growing increasingly unhappy. Fon focuses on profitable router sales, and actively conceals statistics which reveal real growth, churn, and actual service availability. Fon diverts resources to non-wifi related gimmicks and side projects, neglecting the usage complaints and bug reports from the members. Fon to perhaps profit from side projects, when they become independant companies, by bleeding Fon for research & development resources, thus saving them expenses.

Stage 5) Fon forges “partnerships” with other wifi networks by granting “free roaming” for their members, to the whole network of Fon hotspots. These roaming agreements are typically one-way, free only for the partners, and the rest are subject to many conditions for the Fon members. “Partner” hotspots are quickly added to Fon’s census to suggest rapid and healthy growth. Everything is marketed as “good for Fon”, as it is suggested that members of the public are more likely to purchase a Fon router of their own if they are aware of the Fon concept. Emphasis is placed on “network growth”, but this is measured primarily by router purchases now. Fon claims to operate openly, but has never revealed statistics on day pass transactions, repeat sales, or membership churn. Fon continues to profit up-front from router sales, and continue to craft clever statistics to make the company seem more healthy. Fon still reports no churn, and the available figures strongly suggest that they are deliberately ignoring it. Fon CEO and Fon PR contradict each other’s growth statistics, but both suggest that Fon will cease operating at a loss by the end of 2009. Fon to profit if there is a buyer after that point?

Fon claims to have gained it’s one millionth “member”, using a brand new definition of such, and stretching that to a rather wide interpretation. Only a small handful of blogs reported this event. The Press at large ignored it.

*Foneros lose interest for various reasons, including: attracting too few customers, being unable to find hotspots to roam onto, unanswered questions about Fon’s legality, doubts about Fon’s security, objections to Fon’s membership and profitsharing conditions, incompatability with Fon’s router hardware/firmware, other hardware failures, discovering that they were unable to expand an existing LAN on a budget as hoped, or other reasons which Fon did not live up to their expectations.

I have left out a few twists and turns, because they either didn’t last very long, or didn’t result in signifigant change in Fon’s growth, method of operation, or culture. It would be an interesting excercise to draw up an academic timeline of Fon events and announcements, with references, and emphasis on points of contradiction. As for La Fonera 2 and Fonosferatu; we shall see. At the moment, I fear that they are just time-killers to make the company look lively until it recovers or gets sold. Fon has time on it’s hands now, and has those expensive La Fonera+’s to unload. The Linksys are gone, the La Fonera 1.x are probably running low, and there are only 1000 La Fonera 2’s. Fon is still relatively idle. Even their directors and developers are starting to wander into the message board now, looking for amusement.

So in a nutshell, Fon has clearly been sailing for a long time without anyone with a firm grip at the helm. The exaggerations and eroding credibility began quite early on. Fon has lost passengers and officers at every port, and Fon’s final destination changed frequently, with little regard for the remaining passengers. Fon hopes to pay for the cruise by selling the passenger’s belongings, and eventually the ship.

Interestingly, Fon CEO Martin Varsavsky has begun to carefully admit that Fon isn’t doing so well these days. He’s blaming it on the pending economic collapse, of course. However, we know that Fon has been showing signs of floundering and rebooting for a long time now. The layoffs Martin frequently mentions in the present-tense actually happened months ago. If the economy was strong, Fon would be doing just as bad, but still pretending things were rosy.

The new service tiers are called “BT Original”, “BT Openzone Together”, and “BT Openzone Global”. All three tiers provide access to BT Openzone, BT FON and BT Business Total Broadband hotspots. BT Original provides 500 minutes of access, while Together and Global provide “unlimited” access plus 500 minutes of “UK roaming”. BT Global also includes 500 minutes of “international roaming” at other BT partner hotspots like Swisscom Hospitality Services and Comfone’s WeRoam.

If you exceed your 500 minutes in a limited access category, you’ll be billed 10p ($.17) per minute anywhere.

Here are the respective prices for comparison:

Fon Wireless Ltd: £71.02/mo ($91.24) on average at current price
BT Original: £5/mo+VAT ($8.71)
BT Openzone Together: £12.50/mo+VAT ($21.77)
BT Openzone Global: £28/mo+VAT ($48.77)
BT Openzone per Minute: 15p/min+VAT (down from 20p) ($.26)

How prices work out per day including 17.5% UK VAT:

Fon: £2.34 ($3),
BT Original: £.23 ($.40),
Together: £.49 ($.86),
Global: £1.09 ($1.90),
Openzone per Minute: £216.00 ($376.23).
As I reported before, T-Mobile is £.67-£2.00 per day, depending on service plan.

While I can see why residents of England might pay Fon’s current price over the price of BT Openzone per Minute, I do not think they would consider Fon to be competitive against the other BT tiers - also available at BT Fon hotspots - even though Fon includes “worldwide roaming”.

The burning question on my mind is: who would prefer Fon over ANY wifi provider when Fon doubles their price in coming weeks? Will Fon continue to partner with BT when BT Openzone is allready undercutting Fon’s rates at their own hotspots? Will BT continue to partner with Fon after ending their relationship with The Cloud?

Anyone in France, Germany and Spain may join the Beta Tester’s program by purchasing a La Fonera 2.0 “Liberator” in the Fon Shop for €39.95 ($53.92) plus shipping. This new router is just like the 1-WAN 1-LAN La Fonera Plus, but also has an USB port in the back, and an additional LED on the front. Fon hopes you will contribute further to this project by developing support for additional devices, which they will perhaps certify and add to future firmware releases.

It is not clear what devices are currently supported, because if you read Martin Varsavsky’s blog carefully, he is saying that the USB port “could” support devices like USB hard drives and thumb drives, printers, scanners, and webcams. In fact, he admits that support for devices could be slow in coming, and that the use of a powered USB hub is reccommended. That’ll make quite a nest of cables when I winch my La Fonera 2 up on a pole outdoors!

The Fonosferatu “community” of developers has still not been organized, but Fon is certainly still hoping that Foneros will abandon such independant community projects as FreeWLAN and FrancoFon, and come together to work under Martin’s warm, guiding hand. Would you do it for a T-shirt? Martin has provided his wish-list of applications for Foneratus to work on, including the bittorrent application he mentioned when La Fonera 2 was announced back in EARLY JUNE, 2007.

Some things I like about the USB port is the possibility of using it as part of a home security system, when the router is mounted outside with a compatible webcam attached. I have written in the past about how metro wifi projects might like to purchase such routers which can have instrument packages added. This could include traffic monitoring cameras, weather and temperature monitoring, and even gunshot location using microphones and triangulation.

With wifi meshing enabled, city utilities could be measured remotely using devices attached directly to the meters on each home and business. The bandwidth may not be optimal for gaming, but any meter could still be directly interrogated within a few seconds. Energy-saving programs could use this network to shut off unneeded devices and adjust thermostats.

One goal that I think is important to work toward is in developing an USB-over-Ethernet driver, and abandoning development of multiple onboard drivers and services for LF2’s USB port. There are numerous open-source projects like USB Server, which let a PC mount an remote USB port over Ethernet, as though it were physically attached, though that port is elsewhere in the world. This is likely the best way to provide the most compatability and flexibility, while saving LF2’s precious resources for the wifi.

I am absolutely against using technology to further build out the police state many governments are hungry for, but you can see how devices like this can also be owned and used by the citizens for good purposes. For anyone that is interested, tomorrow is an international day of protest against surveillance; “Freedom Not Fear“. Please click the link to find activities in your area.

UPDATE: Only 1000 of these developer’s edition of La Fonera 2 will be sold, but if you’re one of the dozen or so busy Foneros who create an application which Fon actually likes, you could be reimbursed the cost of your router! Have Fon with that.

UPDATE: 10/23 Fon will now accept orders for the remaining La Fonera 2s from any country except Canada.

If you prefer an online tutorial, with plenty of excellent pictures, you can find it here in Kitchen’s blog, or here in the Hack5 forum.

I haven’t followed these steps personally, and haven’t used some of the helper tools, but everything looks ok after brief inspection. Use at your own risk.

As usual, i’m VERY amused at all of the references to some kind of device called “a FON”, and still don’t understand how a young, four-legged ruminant is involved, but then noone ever listens to me.

This is a digest of the thread I started in Fon’s English Board.

There are about 102 Fon hotspots within the Austin, TX metro area. I recently noticed that nearly every Fon hotspot in the south side of the city is now dead, so on Saturday, 9/20 I took a bike tour of dead hotspots to see if I could lend some assistance, or aquire some unwanted routers:

(Click image for full size popup)

I really wanted to do this earlier, but it has been an unbearably hot summer in ATX. I made it a priority when I saw the sudden loss of so many hotspots at once. There is another cluster of dead hotspots I could visit across the freeway East of me, but those are mostly apartments with transient students. Probably not worth the effort. I did not bring a laptop or wifi detector with me. Perhaps I will survey the remaining live hotspots another time.

Half of the hotspot profiles from Fon’s Maps displayed “kasdfgdflkasdf” addresses, or had valid addresses which should not have placed them on this side of town. These were skipped, of course.

Two hotspots were at apartment buildings, and one person was not at home, but I left fliers for them to contact me. The apartment dwellers hadn’t actually indicated their door numbers, so I left the fliers on public bulletin boards. They haven’t gotten in touch with me in 7 days, so I don’t think they ever will.

I did meet 3 very nice people, and had chats with them about Fon. All of the Foneros needed a moment to remember what “a Fon hotspot” was when I asked them about it. I let them know immediately that I was not a Company Representative, just a neighbor. This made them visibly less apprehensive.

My closest Fonero neighbor never used wifi, but had left her router plugged in. She didn’t know it was dead. It needed to be reset, and the hotspot came back on the map. Today, I noticed that her hotspot is dead again, and it’s position on the map has been moved well away from her house. Her address has also been erased from the profile. It appears that she doesn’t want to meet any more Foneros.

One man said that he unplugged his router because no Aliens ever visited it, and his girlfriend no longer needed it for her laptop. He said it was now in storage, but he would consider passing it on if he found it. He also believed that it was causing some kind of conflict with his LAN, but wasn’t able to recall further details. They now have a U-Verse DSL modem with integrated wifi.

The other man said that someone was leeching so much bandwidth from him, that he had to pull the cord. He had forgotten where the router was, if he still had it, but promised to pass it on if it turned up.

The two men who intentionally quit had totally opposite reasons; hotspot used too much / hotspot not visited at all, so i’m not sure what facts i’ve nailed down for the purposes of my brief investigation. Overall, Foneros simply lose interest in Fon and can quit without feeling like they have lost anything. Nor are there any consequences - in fact, they may feel more secure with the Fon hotspot shut down.

Fon still counts them as active members, unless they email unsubscribe@fon.com, of course. Fon makes money selling merchandise and has a small side business reselling access to other people’s ISP service. I suspect Fon rarely, if ever, refunds money or subtracts dead hotspots and quitted members from their census, so there is little consequence for them, either.

I left everyone my name, phone number and email address. Interestingly, all three of the people I met happened to be DSL customers, and used Macintoshes.

So here’s the results of my investigation:

I’ve tried messaging Foneros through the Fon Maps feature, but this does no good because it is not forwarded to their email. It just goes to their “My Fon” bulletin board, which they never see if they have given up on Fon and never log in again.

I’m not sure where to take this forward from here. I could ask my readers what Fon could do to win Foneros back, but why should Fon bother? Fon has their clever numbers, and reserve the right to invent clever definitions. Fon has been maintaining convienient untruths, and probably don’t have the initiative to come clean now. Besides, with Fon in their spam-filters, or free email addresses abandoned, dead Foneros will never receive another ping from the Movement they left behind. The Press won’t even touch Fon now.

I could ask what Foneros could do to win Foneros back, but I don’t want to encourage a gestapo movement, knocking on doors and demanding explanations. I don’t think anyone was upset that I visited them, but there was a moment each time, where I thought I saw them thinking “oh no, I was afraid this would happen”. Noone was interested in rejoining the scene. They were polite, but pointedly disengaged from the subject. The routers were “somewhere, perhaps”, but while noone wanted to use them, neither did they wish to release them.

Possibly, leaders in various cities could publicise campaigns to collect unwanted routers for redistribution, but again, Fon dare not admit that they have any churn or waning momentum. I will redistribute any routers I may eventually collect, but I don’t have the resources to start or maintain anything formal. Perhaps if it was a paid position, I could make it a part-time job on the weekends, eh?

I look forward to your comments.

You can pay £2/day or prepay for a month and surf the web for as little as £.67/day! Compare to Fon Wifi at €3/day. Access is provided by using compatible T-Mobile handsets as a modem, or a USB modem/memory stick costing £49.99.

T-Mobile says a contract is not necessary, but mentions 12-24 month contracts, credit checks, and 30-day cancellation requirements. It’s possible this is simply a try-before-contract deal, but the rates are almost the same under contract.

This is a compelling alternative to Fon and other for-pay wifi providers. Though there may be an up-front cost for the modem, the daily usage fees are far lower, and service availability is guaranteed much higher.

It would be wonderful to have this in the USA. I would not hesitate to join a service like this, to have the freedom to bike out on the trails with my laptop, headset and modem. I’d do a little telecommuting work while sitting under a cedar tree on a cliff top overlooking the river valley. Our beautiful Barton Creek area is surrounded by upscale homes, so cellular reception there is excellent. Of course, i’d experiment with ways to boost my signal, just for the geeky fun of it.

As my eyes rest upon my shelf full of blinking Fon merchandise, I am wondering what Fon will do to respond to this new service? Lower their rates? A new Fon E-Partnership with T-Mobile or AT&T?

I’ve also had my eye on the Fon hotspots in my city. Since I last checked, most of them have gone dead! I’ve been visiting my closest Fonero neighbors and learning why this is. I will blog about this in the near future.

Update: Thanks b250, for pointing out that I used € where actually £ is indicated.

It seems that Fon Wireless, LTD., who forgot to observe their own second birthday, is celebrating the induction of their One Millionth Fonero, Wilkinson-Chan of Japan.

Today, Fon CEO Martin Varsavsky’s blog, and Fon’s own English blog announced that Fon now has one million “Foneros”, “members” or “community members”, depending on whether you read the title or the text of the posts.

Oddly, Martin claims that Fon has “nearly 300,000″ active Fon hotspots, while Fon’s blog says “over 400,000″. I’ve taken screen shots gentlemen, so there’s no point in covering your tracks now.

So why am I a skeptic? It’s those numbers. They just don’t add up the way they ought to. Let’s review Fon Math again, and take note of authoritative sources of Fon definitions.

One Million Foneros. One Million Members. OK, all Foneros are members, and all members are Foneros, this is true. “Community Members” is perhaps a broader term; it could include forum posters who have not registered as an Alien nor Fonero, and this inclusion raises my eyebrows.

The first step to joining Fon is to register your email address and choose a password. This can be done at a Fon hotspot, or on Fon’s home page. This makes you an Alien, who can pay for wifi access, or use your registered identity to order Fon merchandise.

Martin Varsavsky says that once an Alien registers and contributes a Fon hotspot, he becomes a Linus or Bill Fonero, who can roam for free on other Fonero’s hotspots worldwide. (Also, he says that we must buy his La Fonera router to provide that hotspot.) This means that the number of Foneros, or members, cannot be larger than the number of Fon hotspots ever registered.

In fact, it will always be less, because some Foneros host more than one hotspot, and a very small number of discouraged Foneros will go to the trouble of unsubscribing from Fon via the formal, manual process. Here we have a problem, since Fon and Martin are saying now that the number of Foneros is far larger than the number of Fon hotspots.

So what is *not* a member? Martin Varsavsky has been quoted repeatedly and unambiguously, stating that Aliens are not members, and therefore, not Foneros. Here we have another problem, if it is true that 1,000,000 Fonero members, which does not include Aliens, have somehow joined Fon when there are only 300K-400K hotspots.

Please, Fon. It is time to turn off the reality distortion field. We know you are including Aliens in these counts, and this includes every bogus email address entered at a Fon hotspot to get 15 free trial minutes. We know that Fon is not free, just because it offers a brief trial connection, and roaming for contributing members. We know that more Fon hotspots have been registered, and been dead for months or years, than there remain live ones. And we know this still doesn’t even total a million.

Here are the highlights of the current version 2.23.6:

This is very similar to the feature-set of FreeWLAN. Both projects support multiple languages, but if you are interested in joining development, speakers of German may prefer FreeWLAN, while speakers of French may prefer FrancoFON.

Though this edition dates from May 15, 2008, FrancoFON is back from holiday with the September Newsletter, and have plans to enhance the La Fonera Plus/2 router next!

Called 802.11r, or “Fast Basic Service Set Transition” (catchy, huh?), it is the result of four years of research and testing. The IEEE feels that it’s ready for the public, and they approved the standard July 15th.

My educated guess is that this standard could be added to many existing wifi routers, APs and client adapters via software update. Let’s all let Fon know that we need this added to the OpenWRT/Fon hotspot firmware! It would be wonderful to be able to stroll around in zones where Fon and/or their partner networks have lots of hotspots, and enjoy unbroken wifi connections, voice calls and instant messages.

How does it work? I don’t know yet. However, it would seem likely that there must be a background infrastructure where a client’s connection is proxied upstream, and so wifi APs downstream are slaved to a central controller. This isn’t too new of an idea, but ratifying a standard is an important, big step in making this widely compatible. Hopefully, it can serve legacy wifi clients at the same time, and is also compatible with wifi encryption.

This brings Fon’s original dream back into range; Fon was originally concieved of as a FonSpot/JoikuSpot type software application running on PCs, and later, as a hardware router running customized firmware (Linksys), which provided wifi for VOIP handsets. This would function much like today’s femtocells, only it would challenge the telco monopolies by providing cheap calls over wifi. Wifi for other devices was merely a potential side benefeit, and there was no emphasis on “revolutions”, “communities” or selling day passes.

A combination of 802.11r plus a transparent SIP proxy would permit many people to share the same wifi connection for VOIP calls. Currently, SIP would not work at a Fon hotspot for incoming calls, without port forwarding. The consequence of that would likely be to block anyone else from using SIP at the same hotspot.

Read more at VoIP Watch, PC World, and The Wireless Weblog.

My first thought, of course, is how this is excellent news for homeless Bills who have been encumbered by the extra weight of a La Fonera router, cables, and battery packs. Now, when they sell wifi at the train station, they only need to carry a single device with them! Hopefully, Fon can partner with a major cellco and negotiate a discount on their unlimited data plans for this charitable purpose.

JoikuSpot supports the following cellphone models (with an appropriate carrier, “unlimited” high speed data plan providing 3G/GPRS, and carrier provisioning to enable wifi on the phone):

JoikuSpot Premium also includes a VPN client to secure your connection to a home or corporate VPN server. JoikuSpot Premium does not force visitors to a default landing page, and is also 100% customizable for operator whitelabeling and licencing.

More information here:
Joikusoft and FON work together
Joikusoft and FON Unveil Wi-Fi HotSpot Software
Joikusoft and FON unveil Wi-Fi HotSpot software
Joiku, FON to offer premium mobile hotspot software
FON and JoikuSoft Introduce FonSpot Mobile Wi-Fi Hotspot Software

The authors do not appear to have any links with either company, though Ms. Potter is a member of a community wireless research project. There are some very interesting points made about Fon, which echo ones made by myself and other outspoken Foneros over the last two years. There seems to be more criticism for Fon, but some of the comparison points might be a little unfair. It’s like comparing apples to oranges, or in this case, Meraki lime to Fon orange.

This may be great news for Foneros in Germany who worry about their liabilities, when they provide a Fon hotspot! Fon does not consider their hotspots “open”, but neither do they really qualify as “closed”. Fon hotspots are not encrypted, and Internet access can be obtained instantly, without proving one’s identity. Additionaly, a hacker might sniff traffic in order to capture an Alien’s Fon session cookies, then spoof their MAC address, to continue their valid Fon session after the Alien has shut her PC down for the day.

Unfortunately, there have been similar incidents here in the USA, where the courts did not accept the “open hotspot” defense. So far, none of these has involved a Fon hotspot. It remains to be seen whether Fon will provide evidence which could exonerate an innocent suspect.

Isn’t this is a good opportunity for the “World’s Biggest Wifi Community” to take a shot at replacing them? Lucky Bills near these coffeehouses may allready be seeing increased profits.

Now, Starbucks doesn’t want people hanging out in the shop all day, without buying drinks and snacks. Though Fon promotes the idea of “$€3/day”, they also have proven that there is no problem implimenting “15 free minutes”, “60 minutes via SMS” and “5-day passes” as alternatives.

Bill Foneros have urged Fon to impliment a “voucher” system in the past. I think the time has arrived for Fon to impliment such a system for merchants who use Fon!

Merchants could print out a sheet full of voucher codes once a day, through a special MyFon page, and cut them into separate slips of paper. These vouchers would supply an hour or two of wifi, and be useable for 24 hours from the time of creation. Starbuck’s patrons would each create a Fonero account, and then enter their voucher code as payment. Fon could reward “frequent flyers” with Starbucks coupons or other benefeits.

Starbucks might pay Fon a small amount for each voucher which gets used, and Fon would share half of the net profits with Starbucks, just like with Bills. Publicity for both partners would be very good if this plan works out!

The statistics that Fon throws around are nothing if not misleading, and Fon will make no effort to correct journalists who get confused! Martin has used similar figures as from the NYT article, but attributed them to *different* elements, and I compare them below.

Glenn Fleishman writes that “Non-Foneros” pay for access to the Fon Network’s hotspots, but this is not correct. The Aliens, who do pay for Fon wifi, are registered, and Martin counts them in his figure of 830k Foneros. They’ve registered their email addresses, they’re Foneros. It’s almost as though there was a table of figures “Registered Foneros - Registered Hotspots - Active Hotspots” which got bumped aside one notch in the NYT article! Well-researched indeed!***

NYT uses the figure of 332k as the number of active hotspots, but Martin blogs that figure as being total hotspots ever registered. I also suspect that the figure also includes Linksys and La Fonera routers, which were shipped by Fon but still never registered to join the Fon Network.

Martin’s blog posits the number of “active” hotspots is really only 212k, but by downloading the database of hotspots “POI files” (for use offline to find Fon hotspots), the total number of hotspots only comes to 198,366!* This number also disagrees with the figure provided by FrancoFON’s surveys (see below), but neatly comes almost perfectly in alignment if it includes non-reciprocative (they can hop on Fon’s Network, but no arrangement is made for Foneros to hop on theirs) “partner” hotspots hosted by Neuf, Livedoor, BT and others.

Examining these POI files shows that they are filled with hundreds, probably thousands of “junk” entries with fake addresses and impossible coordinates (like the North Pole). Though the blame here lies with Foneros who lied about their real personal data, it is Fon’s responsibility to weed them out. Additionally, Foneros have been complaining that the POI files still contain hotspots which no longer appear on the Fon Map, due to extreme length of inactivity.

Going further, a cursory examination of Fon’s Map shows that a signifigant percentage of the hotspots featured there are offline (ringed with grey). Foneros have also reported that their “offline” icons remain on the map for months after they have turned off their Fon hotspots. Clearly, Fon cannot be trusted to provide accurate numbers of online/offline hotspots, but FrancoFON polls Fon’s database directly and has determined that there are really only 96,170** online hotspots worldwide! That makes 37% of all Fon hotspots offline (Fon POI) or 45% offline (FrancoFON).

Last, but not least, just because a hotspot is “online” does not mean that it is accessible to the public. Most Fon hotspots are in people’s homes where the range may barely reach the street, or not. Even then, the street is an awkward place to sit and browse the web. Many Foneros reported that they could not connect to any of their neighbor’s hotspots, and could rarely even detect them.

Sadly, Fon does not motivate Foneros to place their hotspots in useful locations. The kickbacks for Linus/Bill Foneros (free worldwide roaming, 1/3 of daypass sales) just don’t happen often enough. Foneros who pull their hotspots down do not feel that they have lost something. In fact, they may feel relieved, and more secure from evildoers. In the English Fon Forum, we Foneros are currently discussing ways to display a public success-rating for Fon hotspots, but we doubt Fon will add such a feature when it will surely reveal bad news.

Many remaining Foneros are frustrated that Martin and Fon continue to pursue “partnerships” with major telcos. We don’t share Fon’s enthusiasm because these deals do not include anything for us. Martin grants free access to our hotspots to these “partners” as incentive, and this whittles away what remains of our profit opportunities.

Fon is charging ahead into new territory, (some of which isn’t even wifi related - but still sustained by Fon funds) and left unfinished business with the Fon Community. Fon has abandoned the repair of long-existing shortcomings and flaws in our firmware, security, hotspot management interfaces, customization options and profit-sharing terms. This makes us feel that we are taken for granted, and that Fon is more interested in selling the company than in keeping their promise to us to lead the “biggest” and best wifi-sharing community in the world.

* as of May 19

** as of May 21

*** ADDITION: In Martin’s latest blog entry today, he explicitly states that “People who are not Foneros (we call them Aliens) will be able to access Comstar-FON’s network using pre-paid cards, SMS or the usual options available on our captive portal.” Yet, in Martin’s recent blog about Fon’s statistics, he CLEARLY counts all email-registered Aliens as Foneros to reach the sum of 830,000. This includes all of those unverified crap email addresses which the leeches made up to get free 15 minute trial connections each day. Doesn’t it occur to him that, if the only way to become a Fonero is to register a Fon hotspot, then there would really be fewer than 332,000 Foneros (his figure for all Fon hotspots ever registered)? Some Foneros have more than one router, so the number of Foneros would logically always be less than the number of all registered Fon hotspots. ;)

http://andyabramson.blogs.com/voipwatch/2008/06/can-someone-fin.html

• Total number of registered Foneros: 830,000
• Total number of registered Fon hotspots: 332,000
• Number of recently active Fon hotspots: 212,000
• Fon monthly revenues: €100,000
• Fon monthly cash burn (forecast): €350,000
• Fon employees, worldwide, 2 years from launch: 61

Martin hopes to count 300,000 active hotspots by the end of 2008, though He does not say if this includes “partner” network hotspots. He states that cash burn was still €450,000 last month, and expects profitability by the end of 4th quarter, 2009.

It is interesting how Martin describes 61 employees as a good thing - his spin is that “so few” people have managed “so much” progress. However, this just tends to shed some light on Fon’s notably poor customer service. Fon actually had nearly 100 employees last year, and I’ve just learned that Fon is closing their Swedish and Korean offices, reducing staff in France, and firing one of the two USA employees, for a loss of 14 more employees.

The two USA employees are Joanna Reeves, and English Forum Moderator/Official Fon Blogger Steve Ross. This last item is a great concern to us who support the Fonero community through the forums, for Steve has worked hard and been very successful in restoring civility there after the damage caused by that Moderfon person. Gutting the USA staff like this is a surprising and devastating decision, especially since two years ago, the USA became, or almost became, the home of the largest group of Foneros.

Some more interesting facts from Cincodias:

• Investor financing in 2006: €18M
• Investor financing in 2007: €10M
• Investor financing in 2008: €6M

It’s surprising how Martin Varsavsky promises that Fon will continue to grow and succeed, when the last two years, especially the last several months, have seen so many Fon leaders quit by their own decision.

Reprising my blog adventure on Jan 21, 2007, I’ve downloaded the POI files (.CSV format) from maps.fon.com, to compare with today’s new statistics and see how up-to-date they are. The 90 POI files have grown to 172, representing single regions as large as the USA and the Russian Federation, and as small as Ascension Island and Liechtensten! Some places i’ve never heard of, like “Iles” and “Burkina Faso”. “Serbia and Montenegro” is in the list twice; one of those entries actually seems to download the POI of Yugoslavia.

Most of the POI files are 1k or 2k, and opening them up shows they’re mainly just the results of punching in random words and letters when registering routers. This bogus data really should have been edited out years ago, and the POI dropdown list could use some quality control!

It took me a while, but I appended all of the files together as one, and opened it for a record count:

• Total number of POI indexed hotspots: 198,366 !

Keep in mind that the POI lists still contain many hotspots which no longer appear as icons on the map, due to long periods of inactivity. The map itself contains numerous “inactive spot” icons, which includes hotspots that have been dead for months or years… So even with hundreds or thousands of junk records in the POI, why does it still fall so far short of Martin Varsavsky’s statement of 212,000 active hotspots?!?!?! With no publicly-accessible data to back up Martin’s claims, these numbers are hard to prove credible.

ADDITION 1:

Top 20 Fonero Countries:

1. 36,366 FR - France
2. 33,421 JP - Japan
3. 26,082 DE - Germany
4. 15,512 ES - Spain
5. 14,205 US - United States
6. 12,306 IT - Italy
7. 11,060 TW - Taiwan
8. 9,237 SE - Sweden
9. 6,296 KR - South Korea
10. 6,494 NL - Netherlands
11. 4,011 UK - United Kingdom
12. 3,369 HK - Hong Kong
13. 2,811 FI - Finland
14. 2,438 PT - Portugal
15. 2,496 CN - China
16. 2,017 AT - Austria
17. 1,814 DK - Denmark
18. 1,531 BE - Belgium
19. 1,199 HU - Hungary
20. 980 CA - Canada

• POI/Countries with 1000 or more records: 19
• 101-999 records: 14
• 51-100 records: 9
• 5-50 records: 42
• 1-4 records:91

It’s perplexing why Fon would reduce staff in France, when this is the largest group of Foneros, why Fon would close Sweden and Korea when they are both in the top 10, and why Fon Russia would get so much recent news when they have only 23 hotspots!

Steve Ross has written me to let me know that his Fon schedule remains full at this time, and he has received no indication that he may be let go. The La Fonera 2 Beta Test has not been cancelled, though Steve says the hardware apparently did not ship as expected yet. Fon has experienced a number of unspecified changes, which Steve feels has addressed some of the most-complained about areas.

ADDITION 2:

I’ve been using a web-spider program to test the age of Fon’s POI files. Though Fon Maps makes downloading the POI a 3-stage process “select, create, download”, they are not really generated on demand. I had expected to find that they were several months out of date, and thus, my analysis above would be simply irrelevant. Alternately, I thought I might find that the files always test to be a certain age, no matter what time they are checked. This would be dependent on Fon’s web server, and could suggest that an age difference was merely due to a difference between the clock on my PC and theirs. However, at the time of this edit, Fon’s POI files appear to be 2.5 days old and growing! Since this is too much time to be a clock offset, and too little to explain the differences with Martin’s claims, I am reasonably confident that this is the file’s true age.

Another excellent source of Fon statistics is Francofon’s Fon Maps. I am told that they update their figures every night, and use data from Fon’s own POIs (or perhaps direct database access?). However, they come up with considerably different figures than I got directly from Fon Maps! FrancoFon lists 144 countries, instead of 172. They count 206,886 registered Fon hotspots, not 332,000 or 198,366. FrancoFon has determined that 95,324 Fon hotspots are active, (but who knows if they are accessible?) not 212,000. When the statistics include Neuf and Livedoor hotspots, who are “partner” wifi networks, (though not fully reciprocal to the Fon Network’s members) the numbers come closer to Martin’s claims.

This suggests that Martin is including these, and probably British Telcom and other “partner” networks, in his statement. This practice certainly makes the Fon Network look bigger and more active, but is it reasonable and honest?

ADDITION 3: It’s May 24, and Fon’s POI files now appear to be 5.5 days old, so it looks like they were indeed built late Sunday/early Monday. Now we’ll be keeping an eye out to see if they build weekly, monthly or whenever.

ADDITION 4: It’s May 26, and Fon’s POI files now appear to be 7.5 hours old. Therefore, it would appear that they are currently being generated once a week, Mondays at 1:30 AM CST (Sundays at 20:30 GMT). There are still 172 POI files/countries to download, and “Serbia and Montenegro” is still listed twice.

ADDITION 5: May 27. Concatenating all of the new POI files and counting the records/hotspots results in a total of 199,614 for an increase of 1,248 hotspots in one week. Interestingly, the overall filesize is 87,956 bytes smaller than last week. However, as of this addition, FrancoFON finds 96,170 active hotspots, an increase of only 846 over last week… Have 402 new hotspots already been  binned?

A current thread in  Fon’s English language discussion board, discusses the reason that Fon holds our money for so long, after we have “earned” it. Presumably, in Fon’s own interest-bearing bank account. The setup works like this: most of us have to buy our routers from Fon, for which we receive no guarantees, nor help in making it profitable. This merchandise sale is profit for Fon. Then, Fon takes the lion’s share of any money which IS made at our hotspots. Finally, Fon withholds Bill’s share until his “Piggy Bank” had exceeded a certain threshold. This threshold was just changed from $30 to $20, for which Fon may be commended.

So the biggest remaining issue is: just how much of that €/$3 fee from the Alien really is provided to our poor Bills?

(Click images for full size popup)

This example breakdown uses data supplied by board-poster nick123, with fees which apply there in the UK. As you can see, these “fees” which Fon trivializes to the point of hardly mentioning, and never itemizing, amount to nearly 1/3 of the whole fee! Certainly, this chart would be resized for pay splits in different markets. I’d like to know what those splits are, since Fon doesn’t publicize them. It’s Fon’s big surprise to us, when we examine our Piggy Banks.

Since so much money is being wasted on moving money, I think this shows that Fon’s “€/$3 everywhere” business plan is terminally faulty. Aliens should be given the option to buy larger chunks of online time, to minimize transaction fees. Of course, this makes the issue of billing by the minute for roaming Aliens, and paying by the minute for Bills, more desirable. Since Fon does log hotspot connections down to the second, and they can work out the figures in-house, this would not present an insurmountable complication or expense.

I’ve often written that Fon’s only real service to the Fon Network, is the convenient receiving and dispensing of money, in exchange for maintaining and providing the authentication database. That database is the only unique intellectual property that Fon has developed in the whole two years of operation. It’s convenient for individuals and businesses to seek a “hotspot in a box” solution, which comes with convenient authentication and billing. However, Fon’s profit-sharing terms are, frankly, hideous to anyone actually hoping to make money from the project. Other “hotspot in a box” providers allow much more flexible billing terms, along with firmwares or pre-flashed routers with much better feature sets. Fon sticks with “€/$3 everywhere”, not because it is the best system, but because it is Fon’s system, and they’ve become identified by it.

Fon is going to need to reorganize, or die - unless they sell the company in time. Fon should switch from taking ~%30 of the loot, to charging a fixed transaction fee to every Bill who hosts an Alien, who stays online at least long enough to cover that fee. Fon should accept larger payments from Aliens, and let them use it up by the minute. They should likewise, pay Bills by the minute. Fon should allow Bills to choose when to transfer funds out of the Piggy Bank, but should feel free to charge a reasonable service fee. If Fon wants to be a financial success, they need to stop taking divine tribute from the Fonero peasantry, and instead provide concrete plans for Foneros to help them increase their number of Alien events.

Let Fon sell their own routers, fine/whatever, but don’t allow them to lock out other equipment and firmwares. Being compatible with Coova/Chili/spot is a very easy goal to reach these days. Fon and its active community can provide development and features and scrutinize the security in homebrew hotspots. It kills me that I no longer work for a webhosting facility. I had free rack space and bandwidth there, and I would have certainly set up my own authentication server and webhost to provide exactly the services and terms which I’m describing here. I could be a thousandaire by now.

EDIT: nick123 has offered some additional information, based on his knowledge of UK taxes and PayPal fees. His data suggests that the breakdown looks more like this:
(Click image for full-sized popup)

This is damning evidence that we need to eliminate the credit card/PayPal transaction fees whenever possible, by allowing Aliens to purchase larger blocks of connect time.We need further accountability from Fon. What does that remaining unknown portion go to? What is the split in the USA? In other countries? While Fon does quietly disclose that there are “fees and taxes” involved, i’m sure that they are legally obligated to itemize them for our individual cases. It is indeed unfortunate that I must put that last sentence in such a way, for I have little faith in Fon disclosing just because it makes us happy.

Accountablility is to politicians and businessmen, what sunlight and garlic is to a vampire.

The reason most Foneros have quit Fon is due to anemic equipment and firmware imposed upon them, and the culture of dishonesty in Fon’s press releases and business practices.

After promising to give us firmware which supported dual-SSIDs, Fon switches the bait and presents us with their proprietary, locked-down 1-port router with this feature. No dual-SSID for us Linksys and Buffalo Foneros. It’s just as well, because it turns out that many wifi adapters can’t cope with the little transmission trick that produces two SSIDs.

People with pre-existing home networks discover that they can’t access their LAN resources, even when using the private WLAN. There is no “bridge to WAN” feature. This device *looks* like an AP, but is instead a NAT router. This is one of the main reasons people abandoned Fon. They didn’t want to *start* a network. They needed to *expand* one (and on a budget).

This little overheating brick had WDS meshing built-in at first, but this was undocumented. Hackers learned to use it to aquire an Internet connection without paying or logging in. Fon quickly took WDS out, and has still never admitted it existed. Pres. V pontificates in his blog that the range-extending Fontenna (he sells) is superior to connection-relaying meshing, despite the poor performance of said Fontenna. He should have instead sold us a kit to mount the router outside, with an embedded booster antenna and PoE adapter.

Nearly two years later, La Fonera still doesn’t support MAC cloning, which is such a trivial feature to add. It is necessary for modems/ISPs which lock your service to your WAN MAC. This is another big reason people abandoned Fon- they never got it connected to the Internet. This feature wouldn’t even threaten the sales of additional Fon hardware.

Instead of improving the La Fonera firmware (except to rush out patches to keep people from aquiring better access to their device and developing new features), Fon spends R&D on further routers: Want one precious LAN jack? Buy the new router, at twice the price of the old one! This is surely why they don’t give us WAN bridge in the original La Fonera for free.

What would Foneros really prefer that Fon focus their attention on? Bringing the feature set of the router at least up to the point of every other cheap router on the market, nurturing and empowering the creative community that has built up around Fon, and showing some real progress for a change. Instead, here is “La Fonera Orwellian Name”, for $100, which lets you download free bittorrents of Fearless Leader’s video clips. Ugh.

“Buy thees Skype phone and make calls for free at any Fon hotspot in the world!” they said. Well, sure- if you had the encryption key for all of those Fonero’s private networks. The darn thing wasn’t able to log in through Fon’s public hotspot, until many months later, when a firmware patch was provided. Calls were then free if they were Skype-to-Skype, or you were spending the included “free” 20 trial Skypeout minutes. Skype pulled the ads down. Ugh.

“We split the profits 50-50!”. An outright lie. First, Fon takes unspecified “fees and taxes” out, then splits what is left. Fon refuses to itemize this amount, which varies from country to country and depends on the ISP, so there is no way to tell if they are paying you fairly. Fon only pays Bills if their hotspot is the Point Of Sale for day passes, not for bandwidth, length of wifi sessions, or number of customers. If paid-up customers wander over to his hotspot, Bills get nothing for the service he provides.

Fon’s price per day is quite reasonable when compared to other for-pay mobile Internet services. However, wifi is free in virtually every coffee shop in the USA, many restaurants and libraries, and provided by many municipalities throughout the city centers. Fon won’t budge on the price, or add something to make their service more desireable than free wifi, like VPN encryption.

Fon’s system mimics other “instant hotspot in-a-box” offerings, but these competitors are offering more flexible terms in setting prices and managing equipment. The competitors let you have control of your Internet connection, your router, and the appearance of your hotspot to the public. Fon pretends that they do too, but in reality, you have almost no control over what they clearly consider to be *their* router, and *their* hotspot.

It’s been obvious in recent months that Fon is fading away. Varsavsky spends his time supporting side projects, which have nothing to do with wifi (Mexican Wave, Fon URL Sortener, and several ways to abuse Gmail), and writing bizzare articles in his Fon Blog. Varsavsky recently dumped much of his Fon stock.

Fortunately, there is a thriving community of hackers who still develop improvements for La Fonera wifi routers. If a Fonero is willing to void his router’s warranty, he can have his MAC cloning, WAN bridge and much more. While they can do nothing about Fon’s awful profit-sharing, the routers themselves can even be flashed with entirely different firmware, and be used with other wifi networks, or even liberated entirely, including features usually found only in very expensive equipment.

There are so many other points, I could write volumes. Please visit Varsavsky’s blog, and instead of taking his survey, leave him comments which surely will fall outside his carefully selected choices.

UPDATE: Y’all will find this very interesting. Martin approved another round of comments to that post in his blog. While he approved a comment I made under a fake name, he did not approve a more coherent comment I made, as myself, discussing the exact same points, somewhat earlier that day. This is not proper management of his blog, this is censorship of those whom he dislikes. What a skunk!

EDIT: ChrisPHL points out that I can enable telnet over Ethernet before I even init or flash any firmware by using the RedBoot FCONFIG command: FreeWLAN.info. So why follow this tutorial? While serial console may be slower than uploading via Ethernet, you’ll save time because you won’t need to set up TFTP server, manually configure TCP/IP, rearrange cords, change cords back, reconfigure DHCP, etc.

This tutorial worked just fine for my La Fonera 1.0 (FON2100). If you have the La Fonera 1.1 (FON2200), 1.5 (FON2201), or 2.0 (FON2202), you may find that telnet over Ethernet is allready enabled! One reader has informed me that his newer FON2200 seems to have an *older* version of RedBoot (V1.00 - built 10:37:27, Dec 12 2006) installed on it than mine (V1.3.0), and that the memory range begins at a different address. If this tutorial doesn’t seem to do the trick, try k0k0’s German tutorial, which uses different addresses starting with the second ‘load’ command. FON2201 and FON2202 use different firmware and are based on yet another circuit board. They will certainly require different load addresses.

It is possible to transfer the files using XMODEM or YMODEM if you use a terminal emulator like HyperTerminal. ZMODEM would be even faster and more accurate, but I was unable to get that to work. When I used HyperTerminal, I am pretty sure I used hardware handshaking, but k0k0, administrator of FreeWLAN’s forums recommends setting this to NO handshaking. This may be necessary if you can receive text from the serial port, but cannot get it to respond to keystrokes.

The two firmware files, rootfs.squashfs and kernel.lzma were aquired from this archive, and are stored on my local hard drive. I did not set up a TFTP or web server, as that would require a network connection, and is again, a chicken and the egg problem.

To start with, I have built a working serial voltage adapter, as seen in my previous post, interrupted the bootup with CTL-C, and executed the following commands in Redboot:

1) RedBoot> baudrate 115200 (much faster connection, but I needed to close and restart HyperTerminal using the new speed)

2) RedBoot> fis init -f (this deletes all of the onboard firmware!)

typical response from RedBoot:
About to initialize [format] FLASH image system - continue (y/n)? y
*** Initialize FLASH Image System
… Erase from 0xa87e0000-0xa87f0000: .
… Program from 0×80ff0000-0×81000000 at 0xa87e0000: .

The following commands and memory addresses are taken directly from the DD-WRT tutorial on “Reflashing LaFonera original firmware“, except that i’ve gotten the files I need by other means, and i’ve adjusted the commands for using YMODEM over the serial console instead of TFTP server at a fixed IP. You may use XMODEM if you choose instead, but it is a bit slower. If you must use XMODEM, and it will not start, try switching your terminal emulator from hardware handshaking to XON/XOFF - or vice-versa.

3) RedBoot> load -r -m ymodem rootfs.squashfs -b 0×80040450

typical response from RedBoot:
CCCCRaw file loaded 0×80040450-0×801c044f, assumed entry at 0×80040450
xyzModem - CRC mode, 2(SOH)/1536(STX)/0(CAN) packets, 6 retries

Whew! That was fun! I haven’t used YMODEM since the early 1980’s! As you see “xyzModem” implies that ZMODEM is supported, but the command “-m ZMODEM” is rejected by RedBoot. YMODEM and XMODEM may sit idle for a while before they start transferring. Be patient.

4) RedBoot> fis create -b 0×80040450 -f 0xA8030000 -l 0×00700000 -e 0×00000000 rootfs

typical response from RedBoot: (THIS CAN TAKE A LONG TIME!)
… Erase from 0xa8030000-0xa8730000: ……………………………………
…………………………………………………………….
… Program from 0×80040450-0×80740450 at 0xa8030000: ……………………..
……………………………………………………………………..
……
… Erase from 0xa87e0000-0xa87f0000: .
… Program from 0×80ff0000-0×81000000 at 0xa87e0000: .

5) RedBoot> load -r -m ymodem -b %{FREEMEMLO} kernel.lzma

typical response from RedBoot:
CCRaw file loaded 0×80040800-0×800c07ff, assumed entry at 0×80040800
xyzModem - CRC mode, 2(SOH)/512(STX)/0(CAN) packets, 4 retries

6) RedBoot> fis create -r 0×80041000 -e 0×80041000 vmlinux.bin.l7

typical response from RedBoot:
… Erase from 0xa8730000-0xa87b0000: ……..
… Program from 0×80040800-0×800c0800 at 0xa8730000: ……..
… Erase from 0xa87e0000-0xa87f0000: .
… Program from 0×80ff0000-0×81000000 at 0xa87e0000: .

7) RedBoot> fis load -l vmlinux.bin.l7

typical response from RedBoot (after a really long pause):
Image loaded from 0×80041000-0×801ba000

RedBoot> exec

typical response from RedBoot:
Now booting linux kernel:
Base address 0×80030000 Entry 0×80041000
Cmdline

At this point the serial connection froze. I powercycled La Fonera and observed Redboot come up, and then the serial connection froze again shortly after stating that it was booting the linux kernel… but Wireless Connection Manager showed that MyPlace had been created and I was able to access the onboard web admin. The router is now factory-fresh, circa firmware version 0.7.1 r1!

Next, i’ll leave the Ethernet disconnected, and configure the fonware over a wifi connection to load FreeWLAN. Once that is working, then i’ll install the CAMICIA modified bootloader over SSH *before* I begin experimenting with configuration changes again.

EDIT: The following page of RedBoot Command Line Options helped me a lot in making this tutorial: AdvancedRelay

Well, it turns out that FreeWLAN’s QRM implementation isn’t quite working perfectly. To make matters worse, I can’t just hold down the ‘ole reset button because that button is ignored until the firmware finishes booting and polls it! This La Fonera isn’t finding the WLAN I configured it to join, so it isn’t setting up it’s virtual interfaces. I’m told that it’s stuck in this incompletely booted state forever. All I can do is ping it under very particular circumstances. No SSH, and no web admin exist any more.

Proponents of FreeWLAN advise flashing the kernel ASAP with one which allows reflashing the firmware over the Ethernet cable. I have done this before, when I was using DD-WRT for the La Fonera, but had not yet done it with this particular router. This leaves only flashing by serial connector. This is often referred to as a “JTAG” connector, but technically the La Fonera just has a serial connector that is simply at a lower voltage (TTL) than the serial port (RS232) you may have on the back of your PC. This requires a voltage-level adjustor. The folks at FreeWLAN were very helpful in providing me a list of options, and I decided that I would build the serial adaptor myself.

CLICK ANY PICTURE BELOW FOR LARGER IMAGE

La Fonera 1.0 (FON2100)                 La Fonera 1.1 (FON2200)

The popular design utilizes a Maxim 232 or 3232 integrated circuit. Maxim will provide free samples of this part, with free shipping from their website. I ordered two, which arrived about a week later.

I went to Radio Shack, our local overpriced electronics parts store, for 5 polarized tantalum capacitors, a small breadboard, and a 9-pin female serial connector. The bill came to $12.91 with tax.

I used sections of an old floppy cable for wire and for the connector to the La Fonera, as the holes were exactly right.

As luck would have it, the first one I built didn’t work properly. On my first trip to Radio Shack, I had bought slightly cheaper nonpolarized electrolytic capacitors. The MAX3232 datasheet said that nonpolarized would work, but perhaps that is not so for this particular project. I’m happier with the way the much smaller tantalum capacitors look, anyway.

We have RedBoot!

Also, if I let it boot up uninterrupted, I can hit ENTER for a telnet session to the OpenWRT firmware which the fonware is based on:

Next up is flashing the CAMICIA edition of the linux kernel which permits access to Redboot over the Ethernet port. I may choose XMODEM to transfer files while connected to the serial port. Then i’ll switch to Ethernet to more quickly flash the 0.7.1 edition of fonware which works best with FreeWLAN. Switching to wifi, I’ll manually configure fonware to download FreeWLAN right away, before I ever connect the Ethernet to the Internet, preventing further fonware updates. Fonware updates get slipstreamed into future FreeWLAN editions, and thus the router really does stay up-to-date.

Fon is the world’s largest wifi network (pending public examination of Fon’s definitions and statistics). 

Yay, Fon!

Many devices like cell phones, smart phones and other PDAs are now capable of wifi, but don’t have a suitable web browser. They may have no web browser at all, or the one provided does not support some code used on these portal pages. These devices are ordinarilly unable to use these wifi networks.

Fon’s solution to this predicament is the FON WiFi Connection Manager, which supports Symbian S60v3 compatible phones, including Nokia E60, E61, N80, N91, N92, N93 and N95. However, this still leaves a lot of devices without support!

Devicescape is a helper application which enables more of these lite-powered devices to authenticate and get online. It can automatically connect them when your networks become available, and remember your different usernames and passwords. Devicescape also runs on Windows and OSX PCs, to get you connected more convieniently.

Today the new 2.0 client has been made public, with support for the following devices:

• iPhone / iPod Touch
• Linksys WIP300
• Nokia Tablet 770, 800, 810
• Nokia Phones
• OSX Powerbooks
• Windows XP / Vista PCs
• Windows Mobile

Devicescape 2.0 comes with built-in support to connect you to these networks:

• Atria Networks (Canada)
• AT&T WiFi
• FON
• Google Wi-Fi
• NTT Communications HOTSPOT (Japan)
• Softbank BB Mobile Point (Japan)
• T-Mobile

Support for these networks are available, or coming soon:

• Boingo’s US Airport Locations
• PT Wi-Fi (Portugal)
• Wayport
• WiFly (Taiwan)

If you pre-install the new 2.0 client on your device, you can now use it to access new networks right away, instead of setting up your profile in advance on their website.

Devicescape also works as a replacement for other wifi managers, and will remember the keys for encrypted networks you use, including your home LAN. When you provide this information in your Devicescape profile, all of your other registered wifi devices will be able to log on too.

You and your friends may also invite each other to access each other’s private networks through the Devicescape web portal. When you give access to your friends by invitation, the wifi key is never revealed to them. Devicescape keeps it securely encrypted so only the wifi adapter knows it. You can also revoke these invitations at any time.

Rather than storing an encrypted database of pre-downloaded keys within the device itself, like Whisher, Devicescape attempts to tunnel authentication instructions over the port normally used for DNS requests. Wifi hotspot firewalls often leave this port open, even when authentication has not been completed.

Since this can be used as a loophole to steal wifi, many hotspots have throttled traffic on that port down to bare-minimum speeds, or found ways to essentially close the port. In the future, official partnerships with wifi providers who close the port may be required, so that accomodations may be made for using the Devicescape client.

Devicescape provides additional protection from “rogue” hotspots which look like legitemate hotspots, but are set up to harvest usernames, passwords, and sniff other details from unsuspecting people’s wifi sessions. As I have also suggested to Whisher, Devicescape could sweeten the deal by providing a VPN client, with a VPN server hosted at the user’s home, or available from a 3rd party host in partnership with Devicescape. Another feature that could make both connection helpers very desireable is if this hypothetical VPN service included building virtual networks, as with LogMeIn’s Hamachi product.

Please don’t drive us crazy! It is not an all-purpose syllable like “smurf.” Here is a quick course in Fon Vocabulary so that we all sound a lot more smarterer (put your mouse over the pictures):

This is Fon:                              This is La Fonera:

These are Foneros:

Aliens are registered, paying guests of what we call the Fon Wifi Network. Those who use the anonymous, free 15 minute trial wifi sessions do not have a name AFAIK. If they never pay for their wifi, then they may be called Leeches.

There is no such thing as “A FON” or “Fons”. Well, unless you mean these:

A Fawn:                                  The “Fonz:”

Lastly, “Fon” is pronounced “phone”, and not “fawn.” Fon was conceived as a network of wifi hotspots for the purpose of connecting independant wifi-voip handsets. These could make cheap teleFON calls and undercut the exhorbitant rates of the monopolistic cellular telcos. Wifi for laptops was considered only as a side benefit, since there were allready plenty of wifi hotspots two years ago. Fon hotspots would be different because they would be tweaked for Voice Over Internet Protocol and have their own method of authenticating members of the Fon Network.

But something went wrong, because by Launching Day, Fon had a different business plan. Perhaps they wanted exclusivity with a major VOIP provider, but could not find a partner, perhaps they could not aquire necessary patents which were held by the monopolistic telcos. Fon will not discuss these matters, though interviews clearly describing their original business plan, are still recorded in blog posts.

Today, they tell the Press that “Fon” was named after the North African ethnic tribe of the same name. ?!!?!*%!!! which is 100% BS. Perhaps Fon was gagged by the courts, but there is plenty of evidence now, that they simply have a lot of trouble admitting that they’ve ever made mistakes.

Thank you for your respect and attention to this matter.

Put the kids to bed, and visit Share The Castro for more details and a selection of provocative promotional videos.

Matador Joselito’s YouTube Page