he doesn´t seem to realize his own absurdity…

It is a pity, i was a huge Fon fan at the beginning, but things have changed lots and you are right, it is ridiculous the amount of non fon related things that the labs and CEO are doing, instead of worrying about how to improve services, coverage, fonera functionality, etc. Surely fon shareholders wont be too happy!

As for Whisher.com, it is a -free- solution to sharing -free- wifi safely which has no dependance on router model (or proprietary firmwere therin). Unlike Fon, they do not play tricks with words or claim to offer features which only exist under absurd circumstances or after bizzarre interpretation of otherwise common words. I have not served as moderator of their discussion board for many months now.

It is Fon which is antagonistic to Whisher, because Whisher was founded by some talented guys who severed their partnerships with Martin Varsavsky before Fon even got started. In retaliation, Martin helped other friends of his to launch a Whisher clone!

I don’t know who this “fonoverser” is, but he is advised to stick to facts, and abandon his trolling tactics and personal attacks.

If you look at the map of locations and look at San Francisco then you’ll see lots of penetration. Hotspots everywhere.

I think if they want to stick around they need to keep the free routers sent to those that have a spot where people will use it and not all the citys out in the middle of tim buck two.

community. Fon has shipped many routers here, and provided routers for several gay pride events(!), but precious

little else. The USA was full of enthusiastic Foneros who kept busy building and planning and promoting Fon while

waiting for the Fon-train that never arrived to pick them up. Many members throughout the English speaking Fon

community have complained about being ignored and abandoned! Fon has only quietly maintained 1-2 permanent

employees for the whole USA, and suprisingly, never ventured into Mexico or Canada.

The problem is Fon’s business model: conscript as many true-believers as possible to volunteer their resources,

and sell the company profitably. This is what MV verifiably does with ALL of his ventures. I admired Martin when

I first joined Fon, and he is undoubtedly an extremely charismatic personality, but I no longer accept a single

thing he says at face value.

Some points of ponder: Martin’s blog says Aliens are not Foneros, and Fon says that to be a Fonero you must host

a Fon hotspot. Foneros may host more than one hotspot, and many do so. However, Martin also says there are 830K*

Foneros, but only 332K* Fon hotspots have ever been registered. Also that only 212K* remain active. You can see

what is wrong with this math! Logically, there should be somewhat fewer Foneros than Fon hotspots. It means that

he *does* count every Alien, many of whom consist only of an unverified email address submitted for “free 15

minutes” of wifi.

*late May, 2006

Fon’s hotspot locator map and GPS coordinate file downloads are demonstrably inaccurate. Hotspots remain marked

on the map years after they have been unplugged, and the POI/GPS files are full of obviously bogus data, and

never get purged. FrancoFON, a group who develops an unsanctioned firmware enhancement for Fon’s proprietary

routers, polls Fon’s mapdata server daily. They come up with considerably lower numbers of registered hotspots

(206K*) and active hotspots (95K*).

Also, I share your misgivings about Fon Labs. Fon has abandoned improvement of wifi-related matters like the

login interface, hotspot administration and ISP compatability, for projects which possibly reflect Martin’s

interests after selling Fon.

Other matters of worry include how payments are divided up. Fon has long suggested that money collected from

Aliens is “split” between Bill Foneros and Fon. It comes to light that what they really split is whatever is left

after approx 1/3 is deducted for “fees and taxes”. In my blog, i’ve illustrated what we presume these f&t to be in the UK. However, Fon refuses to verify it, and i’ve been struggling over the last week to get USA f&t information from Fon’s very unhelpful Customer Care. I’m corresponding directly with Arthur Gallanter, who is also Fon’s new English Forum Moderator, and son of Fon’s “Chief USA Fonero” Joanna Rees-Gallanter. Let’s just say he doesn’t know the meaning of customer care. He’s provided numerous factually wrong answers, deliberately misunderstood my questions, and pulled every other trick in the book to evade helping me. He’s warned me that CC has now been coached to provide the same non-answers as he has, and that I should just give up. He signs his emails “Goodbye”, as if that wasn’t blunt enough. As “Board Moderator”, he’s singled me out and warned me that none of my posts may now reflect any negativity for Fon, as he feels I haven’t been “balanced” enough.