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Ärende: FidoNews 23:44 [02/05]: General Articles
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                        GENERAL ARTICLES
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                    FON, the bummer
            By Michiel van der Vlist, 2:280/5555


Last month I wrote about my not so successful hunt for FON access
points. In the meantime it has become clearer why on a ten day 1000 km
trip I was not able to find a single operational FON hotspot.

The sad truth is that FON has mislead the fon community about the size
of the network. When I wrote my first article in July and I proudly
announced that I am now Fonero #67129 and that there were over 70.000
registered foneros by then I did not realize that this number means
nothing. They no longer advertise the number of registered foneros on
the FON website, but in his personal weblog the founder of FON, Martin
Varsavsky, claims the 100.000 milestone has been passed. Thing is...
it means nothing. The 100.000 is just the number of people that
registered themselves. It does not mean that they are active in any
way. Registration is free and it takes effort to unregister. So it
does not take a degree in rocket science to predict that there will be
"some" dead wood in the forest.

The revelation came with the new maps. The old maps just showed the
locations of the registered foneros. But there are actually three
types of fonero: linus, bill and alien. An alien is someone who has
registered himself with FON, but who has no FON hotspot on line. An
alien has to pay for the use of the FON network. A one day card is
three Euro. A Bill is someone who has a registered FON access point
and who gets a share of the revenues generated through it. A bill has
to pay when using someone else's FON access point, just like an alien.
The third and in my humble opinion most attractive option is to become
a linus. A linus does not get paid for sharing his registered hotspot,
but in return gets free use of all the other FON hotspots. World wide.

The new maps make a distinction in that they show an orange dot for a
fonero without a registered access point and a green spot for the
registered ones. Now zoom in on the centre of a big city like
Amsterdam. Don't get discouraged by the extreme slow loading of the
maps. There are a hundred and twenty one registered foneros in the
centre of Amsterdam. But only a disappointing twenty four have the
green aura to indicate a registered FON router. So there are twenty
four FON hotspot in the centre of Amsterdam? Eh.. no. Look closer and
you will notice two different shades of green. Dark and light. The FON
router sends a heartbeat every hour to the central FON server to let
it know it is on-line. The dark green spots are the routers that have
been on-line in the last hour. And then we are down to ten. The rest
is off-line...

Only ten out of a hundred twenty one. 10/121... Other big cities show
similar figures. San Fransisco: 10/149, Berlin: 12/166, Johannesburg
0/2, Rome 9/117. The best is FON's home town, Madrid: 23/204. Mind you
that the routers are on line does not mean they are usable as a FON
hotspot. It could be locked in a Faraday cage, it could be too far
away from the street to produce a usable signal. The signal could be
drowned by other signals. Or the owner could have moved to another
location and not updated his position on the maps. Maybe that is what
happened to the hotspot shown on the maps about two km west of me. I
have been there with the laptop several times in the last weeks, it
just isn't there. According to the maps there was a heartbeat last
week. There was a hotspot in July, but now it just is not there any
more and the heartbeat is now gone as well. Whatever happened, the
only FON hotspot that I ever connected other than my own is gone.

The claims of FON being the largest WiFi community on this planet turn
out to be just hot air and I think FON has made a big mistake by
misleading their congregation to this extent. They need volunteers to
keep the hotspots in the air. To mislead them is not very smart as in
the end the truth always comes out and misleading volunteers is deadly
for their motivation. I frankly do not know if I will go on with the
plan to mount an external antenna on the roof for my FON hotspot. Oh
well, I am a HAM, I like playing with antennas, so I will probably do
it anyway. But how many others will still be motivated to continue to
support the project after finding out the painfull truth?

FON has made other mistakes. Another mistake is that they have dropped
support for the LinkSys. They promised that the next version of the
firmware would have two SSID's. One for a public FON network and one
for a private WLAN with WPA and WEP encryption. They have however
changed their strategy. Apparently the strategy of giving out Linksys
routers for a bargain has failed because many just bought it to get a
good router for a bargain without any intention of ever sharing their
resources. Register it, reflash it with the original Linksys software
and forget about FON is apparently what many did. The problem is of
course that there is no way to prevent this. In most European
countries the "promise" to actually keep the hotspot on line is not
legally binding.

So now they have changed strategy, they dropped the Linksys and they
made a deal with a manufacturer for a custom made WiFi access point:
La Fonera. It sells for EUR 5 plus VAT and shipping and it only works
with the FON firmware so it can not be sold on e-bay. So far... This
leaves the early adopters with the Linksys in the cold. When La Fonora
was introduced I got an e-mail promising me a "special offer" for a
Fonera plus a "surprise". Well I am still waiting. But even if they
give me a Fonera for a bargain, why should I take it? What is in it
for me? I already have what I joined FON for in the first place: free
InterNet access via their hotspots. But that turned out to be a bit a
a bummer...

On the bright side: the firmeware for the Linksys is based on an open
source project: Openwrt. So we may see some "unofficial" firmware
updates for he Linksys emerge in the not too distant future.

And then the maps.. They are next to useless. Last month I wrote about
the shortcomings of the maps; those were the old maps. The new maps
are worse! For starters the system is agonisingly slow. The maps take
minutes to load! Google Earth is an amazing project and I am dazzlad
by the wealth of information it can provide. I can see the solar cells
on my roof. Amazing! And also utterly useless when it come to finding
a FON hotspot. I do not need high resolution satellite pictures, what
I need is aa simple list of addresses or coordinates of the hotspots
in the area I am going to visit. A list that I can print out and take
with me when I go on a trip. Offline! But the new maps do not offer
that. For a short while there was an option to downlaod a POI file for
the popular navigation devices, but they removed that. As to the why
we can only guess, but I would not be surprised if FON was swamped by
complaints of people who drew a blank. Too revealing.


I am also getting serious reservations about FON's business model. As
I understand it FON started out as a competitor for the mobile
telephone providers. That would be nice wouldn't it? Blow those greedy
GSM operators with their usurious roaming charges off their socks! But
I don't hear them about that any more. You need a browser interface to
log into a FON hotspot and there are few WiFi VOIP phones on the
market that can handle that. So they seem to have dropped that idea
and are now concentrating on the more traditional InterNet
applications.

Keep in mind that the actual source of income are the alians. FON is
sponsored by Google and Skype, but they shall eventually want
something in return for their investment. Alians pay EUR 3 a day for
access to the FOn network. That is a lot cheaper than what most
commercial WiFi providers ask, but then again those others actually
have hotspots in places where the traveller can make use of them. So
who is going to pay EUR 3 a day for access via hotspots that are
harder to find than the numerous free ones on this planet?

Frankly I would not be all that surprised if FON went out of business
before I ever have an opportunity to make use of one of their
hotspots. Pity, it looked like a good idea.

Join the family of FON: http://www.fom.com


First published in The Netherlands on www.vlist.eu/fon (c) 2006,
Michiel van der Vlist. All rights reserved. Permission to distribute
via the Fidonews file echo and the FidoNews echomail conference.


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