Oliver Thylmann’s Thoughts

Some nice FON news today. First of all I am one of the good foneros and hence got the Fontenna for 2 EURs. The Fontenna extends my FON signal five times and due to the fact that across the lake from my home they are building a beach club, this might make sense.

Additionally, the difference between Linus and Bills seems to have been removed and now you can make money either way. Choose to be a Bill and you can make money at your own hotspot and roam for free. Nice and makes sense actually. Third, but this does not seem to be online yet, WifiAds are a further monetization part of the entire system that has something to do with ads. We’ll see what that is all about.

Also you can now add FON Hotspots to your GPS and there is a new Symbian client out. All good things. I am looking forward to try out the new Fontenna when it arrives to see if I reach the beachclub

So I finally got my new Fonera working with a connection via the old Fon enabled Linksys router. This was really a pain I have to say. The problem is that the Linksys works on the IP 192.168.10.1 and that’s the IP that the Fonera grabs itself too it seems. At the same time it gave my Laptop 192.168.10.111 which is the IP I gave my Mac Mini. All hell broke loose

After lots of changes that didn’t work, and a hack of the box to get SSH access to see what the routing tables are saying (yes this is denied, but please, then make it work out of the box :)), I am finally up and running. The route to the main Linksys just didn’t get created it seems.

Now I set the Fonera to static IP at 192.168.10.2 and then gave the network a new range at 192.168.11.1 and enabled DHCP again. Now I am in on myplace, can ping everything, surf, and even have access to my private LAN which is great because there is a network attached storage there. All seems to be good now.

Oh and by the way. Connecting to wifi.fon.com didn’t work. I just registered via fon.com. Ah well, after registering the buffalo replacement at Ormigo I will then have 4 routers.

This was bound to happen, and now it’s a fact. FON gets competition in the name of Whisher, which was launched at DEMO yesterday. Venturebeat has a good write-up about it, including that Benchmark Capital Europe with Klaus Hommels led the investment round. Interestingly enough both start-ups are starting in Spain, but that is another matter. The interesting thing is not to see who will get the better coverage. In my view FON has the upside that coffee shops and the like will get a router for free or cheap and can really earn money in the system, meaning that you are likely to find a FON hotspot in a coffee shop or hotel in the not too distant future (I actually found a small conference hotel near here that has one :)). The good side with Whisher is really that it has a very likely viral effect. I often go to friends and they have a wireless lan and I have to ask for the key and things. With Whisher we can all be part of a community that trusts each other and allows us to share each others wifi in an easy and simple manner. You simply install an application that gives you access to other hotspots that are part of the network, simple as that.

I will have to try it out to get a better idea but they have the money to really push it now, which is good. We need more stuff like this and it is still undecided who will win in the end.

P.S.: And I am starting to see some scenarios where a pub might really want to have a Whisher hotspot with community features rather than a FON hotspot. They don’t really need to earn money but can see it as a marketing expense, which they do anyway. We’ll see how this plays out.

I wanted to post about this yesterday but it fell through the cracks, now Martin confirms it. End of next week the Fonera will cost 29 EURs. So if you want to get your fonera for free, I suggest you go at it now. You have a few days left until you will not get it for free anymore.

There will soon be thousands of Foneras in Germany, and hundreds of thousands all over the world. It makes absolute sense to share your nocat. I am sharing it at two places already and if I knew somebody at the airport I would give them 10 and make them a Bill. Sadly I don’t. If you do, go out and get some.

You might just want to have a chat with Fon directly if you believe you can set up a few restaurants in the city center. Check out the “SuperBill Aktion” in Germany.

There we go. As I was told on Thursday, today is the great day of the FON Upgrade and Redesign. I still have to upgrade my own router when I am back at home, but things are looking promising. So what is new?

• FON will quasi give away 1 Million nocat routers for 5 EURs plus Taxes and shipping. The routers normally cost 60 EURs. They already have 54.000 Foneros but they really want to push this to another level.
• They want to have 50k active Hotspots this fall, and 1 million by end of 2007.
• The Bill-Modell is launched. You can now select to be a Bill, getting money for all those that use your hotspot and giving up your right to use the other hotspots for Free. The money is managed through a PayPal account
• “You are the # 13095 member of the FON Community, and you’re a linus” - that means that I share my bandwidth for free and can use the others routers for free too. How cool is that?
• You can look at your Travel Log, in which you see where you logged on and how long you used the router and how much bandwidth you consumed.
• You can see who is using your FON router.
• You can edit the start page, allowing for two urls to be surfed for free, and giving some personal information.
• You can managed your router remotely (with the new firmware which I still need to install, 0.6.6).

Sounds good enough? Check out the re-designed fon.com, log in and play around. congratulations for the relaunch people of FON! Looks great! Update: There seems to be a problem with the firmware in connection with the new updates to fon.com. I, and several others, can’t use the Wifi anymore. You can follow the discussion here. I’ll update when it is solved.

Update 2: Check the general Forums for some information that changing the MTU on a host computer will solve the problem. It by now seems that FON is working on the problem. Monday the 3rd FON support had told me that the tech people are looking into it. Now the community seems to have found the cause. I still presume they changed the server config of login.fon.com. But we will see how long it takes until fon finds the solution.

Technorati Tags: FON, Fonero, nocat